The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris

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00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:12.000 All right.

00:00:13.000 So you are actually the second Will Harris I've had on the show, I should just tell you.

00:00:17.000 My friend Will Harris is a documentary filmmaker.

00:00:19.000 He does MMA films, does films about UFC fighters, and he's been on recently.

00:00:25.000 So people see the name Will Harris, so we have to make a distinction.

00:00:28.000 There are more than one, and you're the different one.

00:00:30.000 You're the farmer.

00:00:31.000 Maybe next time I'll be your friend, too.

00:00:35.000 Well, I first saw you on television doing one of those very quick interviews where they were talking about all these issues that you like to discuss, but they only gave you a couple of minutes.

00:00:48.000 And it was really hard, because you have a relaxed way of talking, but you were very interesting. 0.98

00:00:54.000 And I was watching, and I was like, this is a stupid format. 0.98

00:00:56.000 I want to hear what this guy has to say. 0.99

00:00:58.000 He obviously has a lot more to say.

00:01:00.000 So that's why we're having this conversation.

00:01:02.000 Well, thank you for that.

00:01:03.000 Thank you.

00:01:04.000 That event you're talking about was Fox News. 0.99

00:01:10.000 A guy named Stuart Varney invited me to be on, and he kicked my ass pretty good. 0.99

00:01:18.000 And I... I accept culpability in it. 0.99

00:01:21.000 I don't watch TV much, and I've never watched Fox News.

00:01:26.000 Never!

00:01:28.000 And I should have prepared myself, but I didn't.

00:01:31.000 I took it at its word.

00:01:33.000 I got an email from this Stuart Varney saying he wanted me to be on a segment five minutes ago.

00:01:42.000 Explaining why I didn't think it was good for Bill Gates to own so much farmland.

00:01:49.000 So I said, well, that's good.

00:01:51.000 I have definite opinions, thoughted opinions on that.

00:01:55.000 I want to share them.

00:01:58.000 So, I sat down and wrote up a four-minute explanation of facts of why I thought that's not good.

00:02:08.000 And I thought I was going to get to go through my stuff.

00:02:12.000 And he asked the question, and I started explaining it.

00:02:16.000 And I'm profoundly Southern.

00:02:18.000 You know, I speak slowly.

00:02:21.000 And I was doing what I thought he wanted me to do.

00:02:24.000 And he said, but why?

00:02:25.000 Why?

00:02:28.000 Everything on those shows is just, you gotta get to the point, get to the point, get to the point.

00:02:32.000 It favors people. 1.00

00:02:34.000 If we'd been in the cow pasture, I'd have pinched his fucking head off. 1.00

00:02:38.000 Well, unfortunately, that's his job. 1.00

00:02:41.000 He's got producers in his ear.

00:02:43.000 I guarantee you they're telling him to move things along quicker. 1.00

00:02:45.000 It's a shitty job. 0.96

00:02:46.000 It's unfortunate. 0.99

00:02:48.000 It's a terrible way to disseminate information.

00:02:52.000 Let's start it from the beginning, who you are.

00:02:55.000 Tell us, everybody, about your farm and how everything's run, because it's very interesting.

00:02:59.000 Good.

00:02:59.000 So, I'm Will Harris.

00:03:02.000 I'm the fourth generation of my family to own and manage white oak pastures.

00:03:08.000 I have two daughters and two in-laws who are there with me today helping run the farm.

00:03:15.000 And I have seven grandchildren, so the sixth generation is on the farm that's been in my family since 1866. So my great-grandfather, James Edward Harris, came there in 1866 and established the farm and ran it all his life,

00:03:35.000 followed by his son, Will Carter Harris, my granddad, followed by his son, Will Bell Harris, my dad, followed by me, and now, again, I've got two more generations in the offing.

00:03:53.000 You know, I think the thing I enjoy most, and to tell you about the farm, so the farm is, that farm is 3,200 acres.

00:04:00.000 We do some other grazing, but that farm is 3,200 acres.

00:04:04.000 We pasture raise five different poultry species.

00:04:09.000 Chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas, and ducks.

00:04:12.000 And we hand butcher them on the farm in a USDA-inspected processing plant I built.

00:04:19.000 We pasture-raised five red meat species, cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and hand-butchered them at a separate USDA-inspected facility that I built.

00:04:29.000 We raised pastured eggs, organic vegetables, honey, and a bunch of other little ancillary businesses that go from the organism that is white oak pastures.

00:04:44.000 They're very different from what I did prior to 25 years ago.

00:04:49.000 What did you do prior to 25 years ago?

00:04:53.000 So, prior to the mid-90s, I ran it as my father had, as a very linear, monocultural cattle operation, the factory farm model.

00:05:09.000 And what made you make a shift to the way you're doing it now?

00:05:12.000 Would you call it the way you're doing it now, regenerative agriculture?

00:05:15.000 That's how you would describe it?

00:05:16.000 Yeah, I would.

00:05:17.000 You know, it's just a matter of days before big food takes that description away from us.

00:05:25.000 But it was sustainable, it's been organic, now it's regenerative and makes me resilient.

00:05:31.000 But it is a kinder, gentler agriculture.

00:05:36.000 And it's an agriculture where everything works in symbiosis.

00:05:40.000 Is that a safe thing to say?

00:05:42.000 It's a great thing to say.

00:05:44.000 The chickens grazing, the manure that the cows lay, everything goes back together.

00:05:49.000 Exactly.

00:05:51.000 We call it biomimicry, the emulation of nature.

00:05:55.000 It's a very imperfect emulation, but it's better and better, and it serves to restart the cycles of nature, which we broke through industrial farming,

00:06:11.000 and make our living off the abundance that comes from properly operating cycles of nature.

00:06:24.000 And did you go out on your own to learn this?

00:06:28.000 If your father was a monocrop agriculture guy and you developed the farm in this way, obviously it must have taken a lot of planning.

00:06:37.000 So how did you decide to make that shift and what was the motivation?

00:06:41.000 I'll give you the motivation first.

00:06:45.000 I operated the farm very industrially, as my father did for the first 20 years.

00:06:51.000 I graduated from the University of Georgia, College of Agriculture, with a degree in animal science, not animal husbandry.

00:06:59.000 And I operated the farm very industrially.

00:07:02.000 By industrially, I mean I used a lot of technology.

00:07:06.000 We misapplied technology.

00:07:10.000 Some therapeutic antibiotics, ionos, foas, hormone implants.

00:07:16.000 Hormone implants?

00:07:17.000 Yeah.

00:07:17.000 How does that work?

00:07:20.000 From an endocrine point of view, you've got to talk to somebody else.

00:07:23.000 Oh, okay.

00:07:23.000 But the way it works is you can buy Hormone implants for cattle.

00:07:30.000 And you actually give little pellets that you put in the skin behind their ear.

00:07:36.000 And it causes them to grow faster.

00:07:40.000 Wow.

00:07:41.000 Is that commonly used?

00:07:42.000 Yeah.

00:07:43.000 In the industrial model, it's very, very commonly used.

00:07:46.000 It's a multi-million or billion dollar industry.

00:07:49.000 Wow.

00:07:50.000 So they give the cows extra hormones so the cows get larger, and they try to feed them quicker, and they're feeding them mostly green to get them fat.

00:07:57.000 Correct, which is a very unnatural feedstuff for a ruminant animal.

00:08:03.000 Yeah.

00:08:04.000 That's a fascinating thing, isn't it?

00:08:06.000 Because so many people like green-fed steaks.

00:08:08.000 They like that real fatty...

00:08:10.000 If you give them a grass-fed steak, it's almost like, hmm, this is interesting.

00:08:14.000 It tastes different.

00:08:15.000 They're not accustomed to it.

00:08:17.000 It's a little chewier.

00:08:18.000 It's a little different.

00:08:19.000 It is.

00:08:21.000 And, you know, we...

00:08:22.000 We never market our product by saying, this is the most tender steak you've ever put in your mouth.

00:08:29.000 I hear grass-fed producers say that, and I wince.

00:08:34.000 Because they're setting an expectation we can't get to.

00:08:37.000 Well, it's also, we have to look at the reality of why that animal is so chewy, or it's so easy to chew.

00:08:42.000 It's because it's got no, like, the body is unhealthy.

00:08:47.000 Right.

00:08:49.000 There's so much fat in the system that the body's marbled with fat.

00:08:53.000 If that was a human being and you saw it, that person would be sick.

00:08:56.000 If you look at one of those cows that's completely infused with fat, if that was your body, you'd be like, wow, I might need to get myself together because this is not good.

00:09:04.000 This is not a good look.

00:09:05.000 A feed-like cow is an unnaturally obese creature that would never occur in nature. 0.94

00:09:11.000 Never.

00:09:12.000 Never.

00:09:13.000 So a bull or heifer that I slaughter would be two years old.

00:09:21.000 It would weigh 1,100 pounds.

00:09:25.000 It would have two or three-tenths inch of back fat.

00:09:30.000 And if I gave that animal a presidential pardon and said, we're not going to slaughter you at two years' age, they would live to be 20-something years old, probably.

00:09:44.000 That's the normal life expectancy of a cow.

00:09:49.000 Contrast that to a feedlot animal that would yield prime or choice.

00:09:55.000 They would be probably 16 to 18 months of age, not two years.

00:10:02.000 They would probably weigh 1,300, 1,400 pounds, not 1,100.

00:10:07.000 They would have three-quarters of an inch of back fat. 0.97

00:10:11.000 And while I have not done this, I would be willing to bet you that if you left that animal in the feedlot, gave it that same presidential pardon, it wouldn't live much over another year or so.

00:10:25.000 You're eating a naturally obese creature that would never occur in nature and is slowly dying of the same diseases of sedentary lifestyle and obesity that kill most of us.

00:10:40.000 So you're saying that a cow with a grain-fed diet, before they slaughter it, they just let it live, it would only live a year or so longer than that?

00:10:49.000 That's my bet.

00:10:51.000 During the pandemic panic, when the packing plants were closed down, they were euthanizing chickens and hogs particularly because they couldn't slaughter them,

00:11:08.000 so they euthanized them.

00:11:09.000 Now, I own my own packing plant, and we never shut down.

00:11:14.000 That's a sign of resilience.

00:11:16.000 But if I had, I wouldn't have euthanized anything.

00:11:19.000 They'd been fine.

00:11:20.000 They would have kept eating, but they'd been fine.

00:11:23.000 And you would have gone right back to the natural cycle two years later if you had to shut down for that long.

00:11:28.000 Yeah.

00:11:28.000 I mean, we would have just kept accumulating animals in the pasture until I could open my packing plant back up.

00:11:35.000 Now, why did they have to euthanize the animals?

00:11:37.000 Because they didn't have the resources or because the animals weren't doing well?

00:11:42.000 Euthanize, to me, when I hear euthanize, I think something's wrong.

00:11:45.000 Like, you've got to put them down because they're sick or there's no room for them.

00:11:49.000 Why are they doing that?

00:11:50.000 You know, I would say it's because those are confinement animals.

00:11:55.000 That live in very expensive confinement facilities.

00:11:58.000 And they had nowhere to go with them.

00:12:04.000 That's hard to deal with.

00:12:06.000 That's just hard to imagine that life becomes that invaluable.

00:12:10.000 That you could just decide to euthanize them all.

00:12:13.000 No one's gonna buy them. 1.00

00:12:15.000 We're just gonna kill them all. 1.00

00:12:16.000 I think that's what happened. 0.99

00:12:20.000 So, 25 years ago, you changed the model of your farm, and you restructure everything.

00:12:26.000 What were the steps you had to do, the steps you had to take to go about doing that?

00:12:30.000 Okay, so it was, you first asked why, so let me answer that.

00:12:35.000 Okay.

00:12:36.000 So, this is not to my credit, but I... In my 40s, I became increasingly aware of the unintended consequences of the production model that I was using,

00:12:52.000 the industrial commodity centralized model.

00:12:57.000 And I didn't like it much.

00:12:59.000 The more I looked at it, the less I liked it.

00:13:02.000 Animal welfare was the canary in the coal mine.

00:13:08.000 What I had previously believed to be good animal welfare is what most people still think of as good animal welfare.

00:13:18.000 And that is, you keep the animal well-fed, watered, In a comfortable temperature range, you don't intentionally inflict pain and suffering on the animal, and you're good to go.

00:13:35.000 All the boxes are checked.

00:13:36.000 That's good animal welfare.

00:13:38.000 But to me, and I subscribe to that, but to me in my 40s, I didn't like that much anymore.

00:13:46.000 I felt like it was, in addition to those things, incumbent upon me as the stockman Yeah.

00:14:04.000 Yeah.

00:14:07.000 Yeah.

00:14:21.000 And I believe that puts the animal...

00:14:22.000 I think it's like if you're raising your kid...

00:14:26.000 Let's talk about good parenting.

00:14:29.000 Good parenting doesn't mean you take your child, your daughter, and put her in the closet.

00:14:36.000 It's 72 degrees.

00:14:38.000 You got the light on.

00:14:40.000 You got a mattress in there.

00:14:41.000 You give them all the Cheetos and Oreos and Fritos they want.

00:14:44.000 And that's good parenting because they'll never be abducted.

00:14:48.000 They'll never fall down and break their leg.

00:14:52.000 But it's not.

00:14:53.000 You've got to give those children the opportunity to express instinctive behavior.

00:14:58.000 I think that's also incumbent upon the stockman with his livestock.

00:15:02.000 So I changed the way I raised, at that time, only cattle.

00:15:08.000 I was a monocultural cattleman at that time.

00:15:10.000 I quit feeding. 0.98

00:15:14.000 We used to literally feed chicken shit to cows, chicken litter. 0.92

00:15:20.000 You put enough corn and enough molasses in it, and you give them enough sub-therapeutic antibiotics to keep them healthy. 0.86

00:15:27.000 And you can get incredibly cheap weight gains.

00:15:31.000 And it's legal.

00:15:32.000 It's fine. 1.00

00:15:33.000 Chicken shit. 1.00

00:15:34.000 And what's the benefit of that? 1.00

00:15:35.000 Is chicken shit high in calories? 0.99

00:15:37.000 Chicken shit's high in nitrogen, which is protein. 0.97

00:15:40.000 And there are calories there. 0.99

00:15:44.000 It's from confinement chicken houses.

00:15:47.000 So there's a lot of wasted feed in there.

00:15:49.000 From a purely nutritional perspective, if you view the world...

00:15:56.000 Myoptically through that view of just the nutrition going into that animal.

00:16:02.000 Right.

00:16:02.000 It's a great feed, mostly because it's cheap and it works.

00:16:07.000 But it's not the thing to do. 0.79

00:16:08.000 Yeah, it's disgusting.

00:16:10.000 So I quit doing those kinds.

00:16:13.000 Is that common?

00:16:16.000 I did it, yeah.

00:16:18.000 I have been to courses at Auburn University where we were taught how to do that.

00:16:26.000 Wow.

00:16:27.000 So one of the horrors of animal agriculture was the great, the moment in England and in Europe where there's mad cow disease spread through the land, where I had a friend who, I think it was a decade plus later,

00:16:44.000 after he had been to England, There was something about his medical report.

00:16:49.000 He had a list that he lived there during the time that he ate ground beef.

00:16:53.000 Because so many people had gotten mad cow disease from people feeding cows cows. 0.57

00:16:59.000 That's how that came about, right?

00:17:01.000 They were feeding cows cow brains.

00:17:03.000 BSE, bovine...

00:17:07.000 Encephalus, whatever that stands for, PSE, Bobine Spongiform Ecephalitis, I think it is, comes from prions, which when they grind the central nervous system of an infected animal,

00:17:24.000 you convey it to healthy animals.

00:17:27.000 And that was done in England fairly extensively, apparently.

00:17:35.000 And that's for the same purpose, just because it's high in calories, it's cheap, they were going to throw it away anyway.

00:17:39.000 Correct.

00:17:42.000 Anyway, to finish the question, most of my transition from what I did 25 years ago to what I do today involved just giving up stuff, giving up procedures, giving up products, giving up techniques.

00:17:59.000 The The problems that we have in agriculture today that make it so destructive is the misapplication of technology.

00:18:12.000 I've been accused of being anti-technology, and I am not.

00:18:16.000 My farm is a $25, $6 million business with 180-something employees.

00:18:23.000 We employ a lot of technology.

00:18:25.000 But reductive science technology does not lend itself to living systems, whether it's your body or my farm.

00:18:35.000 Living biological systems...

00:18:39.000 Have so often unintended consequences to misuse technology, and the unintended consequences are usually unnoticed consequences, and they're undesirable consequences.

00:18:56.000 And so, like, what did you see as far as what technological applications on farms did you see that were particularly destructive that you felt like you had to eliminate from your farm?

00:19:07.000 So it's a lot of them...

00:19:09.000 I'm gonna switch over and talk about the land side of it.

00:19:12.000 Okay.

00:19:12.000 So there's the animal, the land, and the community.

00:19:16.000 Those are the three things that we think we're good at.

00:19:19.000 Okay.

00:19:20.000 So let's talk about the land side because it's a little easier.

00:19:29.000 So, I would say the three of the most damaging things we do to our soil, our land, is cultivation, the use of chemical fertilizers, and the use of pesticides.

00:19:47.000 You know, and most of this misused technology came from the war effort, from the Second World War.

00:19:57.000 I don't think agriculture changed much from the time the first person domesticated the first animal or put the first seed in the ground until post-World War II. And I'll give you some examples.

00:20:11.000 Ammoniated fertilizer, chemical fertilizer, was invented, I think, in Germany in the 1880s or something.

00:20:22.000 But farmers didn't use it because it was very expensive.

00:20:28.000 After the war, so much money had been spent on the munitions factories, the technology to build those factories and make munitions, that somebody figured out that,

00:20:46.000 wow, we can make ammonia fertilizers cheap enough to sell it.

00:20:49.000 And they literally, companies, multinational companies, literally put salesmen out in the field to Bluffton, Georgia.

00:20:57.000 I heard my dad tell stories about that.

00:21:00.000 And to sell ammoniated fertilizer to the farmers.

00:21:04.000 Well, ammoniated fertilizer is like steroids in your body. 0.77

00:21:08.000 You put it on the land and immediately you've got this very visual growth and productivity boost.

00:21:20.000 What is an ammoniated fertilizer that's different from regular fertilizer?

00:21:24.000 Well, prior to that, it was organic fertilizer.

00:21:28.000 Manure, things like that, compost.

00:21:35.000 Yeah, we read once that people used to have wars over batshit.

00:21:40.000 That batshit was so valuable that people would fight for batshit.

00:21:44.000 Good point.

00:21:46.000 That's where batshit crazy comes from, apparently.

00:21:51.000 It was the most efficient way to import nutrients into cropland was Guano, but until World War II. Ammoniated fertilizer is chemically produced fertilizer.

00:22:09.000 And what is exactly in it?

00:22:10.000 Well, it can be a lot of things, but in this case we're talking about ammonium nitrate or urea or maybe anhydrous ammonia.

00:22:18.000 So it's in super large doses that would normally not exist in compost or manure or any things like that?

00:22:24.000 So ammonium nitrate, I think, is 33.5% nitrogen.

00:22:30.000 Urea, I'm pretty sure, is 44% nitrogen.

00:22:34.000 And the best compost or guano that you could find would be way under 10% nitrogen.

00:22:46.000 It's just like steroids, right?

00:22:48.000 Got it.

00:22:48.000 So supercharged volumes of nitrogen, and it makes things grow quickly.

00:22:53.000 In fact, since we're into this, I'll tell you a brief story.

00:22:57.000 So my dad told me that he was born in 1920. So 1946, he'd been 26 years old and taking over the farm.

00:23:05.000 He told me that in 1946, after the war, a salesman came to Bluffton, our little town, and had a fish fry or barbecue or whatever it took to bring the farmers in.

00:23:18.000 He had two 200-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that had been made in munitions factories.

00:23:27.000 And they gave every farmer like a five or ten pound bag to take home.

00:23:35.000 And the ask was, go home, put this out on your grass, your pasture, wet it, put water on it, and don't look at it for about three days, then come back.

00:23:46.000 And my dad did that.

00:23:48.000 And when he came back where they put the ammonium nitrate, you know, it was a foot taller and five shades greener than the rest of it. 0.95

00:23:57.000 And he said, damn, I want the whole farm to look like that.

00:24:03.000 And from 1946 to probably... 0.98

00:24:07.000 In 1996, 50 years, that'd be 50 years, either my dad or I put ammoniated fertilizer on every acre of land we had every single year.

00:24:19.000 Now, the benefit was so obvious.

00:24:23.000 You could see it.

00:24:24.000 You could see it at 30 miles an hour just looking out the window.

00:24:28.000 What you couldn't see is that that ammoniated fertilizer It oxidized the carbon in the ground, the organic matter in the soil.

00:24:40.000 Oxidized it, right, chemically.

00:24:42.000 It killed the microbes in the soil.

00:24:45.000 Not sterilized them, but it was bad for the microbes.

00:24:49.000 It had some other negative chemical impacts, but you couldn't see them.

00:24:57.000 If you dug around the dirt with your fingers, you wouldn't have seen it.

00:25:00.000 And at the time, was this a fairly new thing that people were doing?

00:25:03.000 So it was invented in World War II? When did it start being wide-scale implemented on farms?

00:25:08.000 Post-World War II. I think it was invented in the 1880s, but it was so expensive, farmers didn't use it.

00:25:16.000 Until post-World War II when they repurposed the munitions.

00:25:21.000 I see.

00:25:21.000 And that made it effective to use financially.

00:25:23.000 Cost-effective.

00:25:24.000 Yeah.

00:25:24.000 So when these people started doing it, there was no long-term understanding of consequences.

00:25:29.000 They didn't really know what to expect in terms of what you're saying about it oxidizing the carbon.

00:25:34.000 No one knew about all that.

00:25:35.000 That's exactly right.

00:25:37.000 And really, when I was at the University of Georgia in the 70s, we still didn't know about it.

00:25:43.000 We didn't talk about that.

00:25:46.000 So everyone's still just talking about the effectiveness of it then?

00:25:49.000 Absolutely.

00:25:50.000 When I was taking soils in the 70s, we talked extensively about soil structure, soil texture, soil chemistry.

00:26:02.000 We never talked about soil biology.

00:26:05.000 And if we did, we were talking about soil fumigants or soil sterilants.

00:26:12.000 Because, you know, that was an era when Germs make you sick.

00:26:18.000 Right.

00:26:18.000 Germs are bad.

00:26:20.000 Microbes are germs. 0.95

00:26:22.000 Kill the germs. 0.99

00:26:23.000 Right. 0.97

00:26:24.000 Yeah.

00:26:26.000 And when did they figure that out, that it's actually that there's soil biology?

00:26:32.000 And that you have to manage that, and that these fertilizers were causing long-term consequences.

00:26:39.000 When did they first start sorting that out?

00:26:41.000 Well, I think it's getting sorted out now.

00:26:44.000 Now?

00:26:44.000 Just now?

00:26:46.000 Well...

00:26:46.000 Last five years, ten years?

00:26:48.000 You know, I guess the...

00:26:51.000 I guess the organic vegetable movement was probably the first harbinger of that in probably the 70s.

00:26:58.000 But it was very fringe and niche-y.

00:27:01.000 It was very vegetable-oriented.

00:27:03.000 And were they aware of the consequences of herbicides back then?

00:27:06.000 Like, what was causing that?

00:27:08.000 I think we're just now realizing those things.

00:27:12.000 We say realize.

00:27:13.000 You know, you've got some fault leaders somewhere that have probably been around for a long time, but as far as actual acceptance by the practitioners, I think it's just now happening, and it's really struggling to happen.

00:27:30.000 It's hard to get off of a crutch.

00:27:32.000 And herbicides are a big crutch, right, for monocrop agriculture?

00:27:36.000 Anything with side is a last name.

00:27:40.000 Side means kill, right?

00:27:42.000 Oh, right.

00:27:42.000 Yeah, homicide.

00:27:43.000 That's Latin.

00:27:44.000 Yeah.

00:27:44.000 So homicide, herbicide, pesticide, insecticide, fungicide, nematicide, sides.

00:27:53.000 No sides.

00:27:55.000 No sides.

00:27:56.000 So this is interesting to me, if I can digress a minute.

00:28:00.000 Yeah.

00:28:01.000 So...

00:28:04.000 Pharma, I think, means care, health care.

00:28:07.000 So, you know, pharmaceutical companies and pesticide companies.

00:28:11.000 And I can remember hearing a long time ago that the way to make money is sell bullets and bandages.

00:28:19.000 You teach them how to hit the target, and then you provide them with the bandage.

00:28:24.000 And for one company, like Bayer or Monsanto, if they sell Roundup and aspirin, they sell bullets and bandages.

00:28:34.000 It's a hell of a deal.

00:28:35.000 It's a hell of a deal.

00:28:38.000 We've talked about Roundup many times on the podcast about how many people, when you test their blood, you find Roundup in it.

00:28:46.000 It's some crazy number.

00:28:47.000 What is it, like 80%, right?

00:28:48.000 Very high.

00:28:49.000 Very high number of people test positive for glyphosate, which is very disturbing because people want to pretend that it's not having any effects on people.

00:28:58.000 Well, you don't even know.

00:28:59.000 And then they were talking about the numbers, the minuscule amounts of glyphosate.

00:29:05.000 It's no big deal.

00:29:06.000 And my thought was like, why are you making apologies for that?

00:29:08.000 First of all, you're saying it's no big deal.

00:29:10.000 You don't know if it's not a big deal.

00:29:12.000 And second of all, You're only talking about some people have low amounts.

00:29:18.000 Like, what's the overall average that people have, and what's the high end?

00:29:22.000 At the high end, should you be warning the people that have a high level of glyphosate because they ingest it every day?

00:29:28.000 At what levels is it toxic, and is this really well understood?

00:29:32.000 It seems like it's understood that it's not good for you.

00:29:34.000 Let me bring that home for you.

00:29:36.000 Please do.

00:29:37.000 From a practitioner's perspective.

00:29:38.000 So, I've used an incredible amount of glyphosate in my life, Roundup glyphosate.

00:29:43.000 When was that stuff invented?

00:29:45.000 You know, that was a new product, fairly new product, when I was getting out of Georgia in the 70s.

00:29:53.000 So, and I started using it right out of college and used it until the mid-90s, maybe late 90s.

00:30:01.000 I don't really know, maybe...

00:30:03.000 I quit these things gradually.

00:30:05.000 I don't know what day I quit that.

00:30:07.000 But I tell people that there are days I would kill a man for a load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer because it's just so good.

00:30:18.000 And similarly, I have a new non-native invasive plant on my farm, new to me.

00:30:25.000 It's called Tropical Soda Apple.

00:30:28.000 It's from the Caribbean.

00:30:31.000 They speculate it came up here in bird droppings.

00:30:34.000 Oh, wow.

00:30:35.000 And it's related to the tomato.

00:30:37.000 It's very invasive.

00:30:40.000 Is it edible?

00:30:43.000 Not by you and I. I mean, I've tasted it.

00:30:45.000 It's not good, but it's a nightshade.

00:30:47.000 But birds, cows, hogs, sheep, goats, coyotes, everything eats those little berries.

00:30:55.000 But it's not a good plant because it literally dominates the landscape.

00:31:04.000 So, I'm battling it right now on my farm.

00:31:08.000 And I'm using...

00:31:10.000 I've got something I'm excited about now, but I've been using...

00:31:19.000 Organic apple cider vinegar and soap to fight it.

00:31:24.000 And it's not very efficacious.

00:31:25.000 Spraying it.

00:31:26.000 It's not very efficacious at all.

00:31:27.000 I mean, eventually, if you keep spraying it, you'll kill it.

00:31:31.000 But it takes a lot.

00:31:33.000 You know, I could give it a breath of Roundup and it would die.

00:31:38.000 But I don't want to use Roundup for the reasons you stated.

00:31:42.000 My employees, my family, my animals would be out there the ones doing it.

00:31:48.000 So I've resisted the incredible temptation like I kill a man for a gallon of Roundup.

00:31:59.000 Is there any other way?

00:32:00.000 Could you grid it off and do it by hand?

00:32:03.000 I'm glad you asked.

00:32:04.000 So one of the ancient Greeks said, For every pestilence that nature sends, she sends the cure.

00:32:12.000 They're not absolutely prescribed to that.

00:32:15.000 That's part of the balance, the cycle, the symbiosis you mentioned earlier.

00:32:19.000 Is there a bug that eats them?

00:32:21.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:32:22.000 So there's a professor at the University of Florida who has brought in a beetle from Paraguay.

00:32:31.000 And she assures me that it eats nothing but tropical soda apple.

00:32:36.000 So I have bought...

00:32:38.000 Actually, she gave them to me.

00:32:40.000 I offered to buy them.

00:32:40.000 She sent me some beetles, and I've turned them loose.

00:32:44.000 Oh, boy.

00:32:46.000 Sounds like a horror movie.

00:32:47.000 Like, this is the beginning.

00:32:50.000 Whoa, they're cool-looking.

00:32:52.000 Tropical soda apple leaf beetle.

00:32:56.000 Yep, that's him.

00:32:58.000 Gratiana Boliviana.

00:33:01.000 Wow, what a crazy looking bug.

00:33:05.000 So all it does is eat soda leaves.

00:33:07.000 That's exactly what I'm told, and I believe, and it's my observation.

00:33:11.000 If I didn't just dump them out and go home, I've been looking at them every single day since I put them out, and I see them eating the tropical soda apple.

00:33:19.000 And they're not eating it like locusts.

00:33:21.000 I mean, it's a slow process.

00:33:24.000 Which you want.

00:33:25.000 Which I want.

00:33:25.000 Because otherwise they'll run out of stuff to eat and they'll migrate to other things, right?

00:33:29.000 Isn't that the fear, though?

00:33:30.000 Yeah.

00:33:31.000 Tortoise beetle.

00:33:32.000 Yeah, it's also a...

00:33:35.000 There's a certain concern about whether they'll overwinter on my farm.

00:33:40.000 Whether they survive?

00:33:41.000 Yeah.

00:33:42.000 Maybe it'd be good if they don't.

00:33:44.000 You know, I don't feel necessarily bad about this.

00:33:47.000 I think that, you know, we have screwed with Our wildlife.

00:33:55.000 And this is wildlife.

00:33:57.000 How many species have gone extinct?

00:34:00.000 You read about that all the time.

00:34:01.000 Increasingly.

00:34:02.000 More and more and more species.

00:34:03.000 And it's all part of this incredible damage that we're doing through misused technology.

00:34:11.000 In agriculture.

00:34:13.000 Is there any concern, though, about bringing in an invasive beetle species that it might migrate onto other foods and, like, destroy other plants?

00:34:20.000 That's certainly something that I considered, and I've extensively been assured that's not going to happen.

00:34:26.000 It might.

00:34:27.000 So it would have to morph.

00:34:28.000 It would have to, like, make a change in what it eats.

00:34:31.000 And, you know, I believe in nature.

00:34:33.000 I believe in that kind of evolution.

00:34:34.000 But, you know, what's happening now is equally bad.

00:34:39.000 Right.

00:34:40.000 I could very easily wind up with a 3,200-acre monoculture of tropical soda apple on my farm, which is equally flying in the face of nature.

00:34:48.000 And yeah, so if you weren't a steward of the land, you didn't take care of that, that could be the trend that it's going into.

00:34:54.000 This is not new.

00:34:56.000 Do you know what kudzu is?

00:34:57.000 Yes.

00:34:58.000 Yeah, we've showed photos of that stuff, too.

00:35:01.000 Okay, so...

00:35:02.000 Let's pull it up, because it's pretty wild how it takes over.

00:35:05.000 Where did that come from?

00:35:06.000 It come from Japan?

00:35:07.000 China? 0.73

00:35:08.000 China? 0.73

00:35:08.000 It was brought in intentionally, just like I intentionally brought in the... 0.73

00:35:12.000 There it is.

00:35:14.000 It just covers everything.

00:35:15.000 It has destroyed thousands, hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands of acres of timber in the southeast.

00:35:22.000 It's crazy what it looks like, too, because it looks like a fungus or something.

00:35:26.000 Like, it's so prevalent, like it just overwhelms everything and covers all the trees.

00:35:32.000 So here's the killer now.

00:35:34.000 Do you know what the cure for kudzu is?

00:35:37.000 Another bug?

00:35:38.000 Cows, sheep, and goats.

00:35:40.000 Really?

00:35:41.000 They eat that stuff?

00:35:41.000 If I own that piece of property you're showing right now, and I put a good fence around it, and turn my cows, sheep, goats, I'd probably put hogs in there too, let them work on the roots.

00:35:53.000 In time, they would eat it to death.

00:35:56.000 It's actually quite a nourishing plant for livestock.

00:36:00.000 Really?

00:36:00.000 That's interesting.

00:36:01.000 So someone could intentionally grow it on their farm if they wanted to have nourishing food for their animals?

00:36:07.000 You could.

00:36:08.000 You probably economically wouldn't because it's not very persistent.

00:36:12.000 The fact that they can eat it to death would cause it to be not real cost-effective to plant for the animals.

00:36:18.000 Seems like if you get it, well, there they are.

00:36:20.000 They're eating the hell out of it.

00:36:22.000 But if you get it to the point where it was in that last photograph, like, good luck eating that all to death.

00:36:27.000 Like, how are you going to keep up with that?

00:36:29.000 There was so much.

00:36:30.000 That one photo that you showed, Jamie, where the entire forest is covered in that stuff?

00:36:35.000 I give you my word.

00:36:37.000 Yeah, that one right there.

00:36:37.000 I give you my word.

00:36:38.000 Think you think you threw that?

00:36:39.000 I got probably 3,300 cattle on my farm right now.

00:36:42.000 No, you're right through that.

00:36:44.000 Yeah, you're right through it.

00:36:45.000 Yeah.

00:36:46.000 I mean, how quick?

00:36:47.000 Well, how many acres is it?

00:36:48.000 I don't know, but you know.

00:36:49.000 The big question about regenerative farming for most people is, is this scalable to what our current reality is as far as urban life?

00:36:59.000 You know, we've talked about this a bunch of times, but living in cities, you've got in Los Angeles is a good example.

00:37:05.000 I think there's something like 18 million people living in the Los Angeles area.

00:37:09.000 But no one's growing food.

00:37:10.000 So everything has to be shipped into there.

00:37:12.000 Everything.

00:37:13.000 And it's a very unnatural state for people.

00:37:16.000 When we want to be able to just pull into a Jack in the Box and get a cheeseburger, How much meat is required to feed 18 million people that don't farm?

00:37:29.000 That's so many people that aren't farming, so many people that aren't growing any food.

00:37:33.000 So it's got to be grown in these other places, but could you have a farm that's a regenerative farm that's so large And supplies so much food that you could feed people the way they're living right now, but do it completely naturally?

00:37:47.000 Or do we need a certain amount of factory farming in order for people to live like that today?

00:37:53.000 Good.

00:37:53.000 I think I got an answer for you.

00:37:56.000 Okay.

00:37:58.000 So, I'm not going down this road, but the first thing I could probably do is argue we shouldn't have 18 million people.

00:38:04.000 It's a good argument.

00:38:05.000 But let's not even have that one.

00:38:06.000 Right.

00:38:07.000 We can have that one later.

00:38:09.000 They're here.

00:38:09.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:38:10.000 Right.

00:38:11.000 All right.

00:38:11.000 I'd like to hear your thoughts on why it's bad, though.

00:38:13.000 I'll give it to you.

00:38:14.000 So, let's answer this question first.

00:38:16.000 Okay.

00:38:21.000 One thing that's a little bit unusual about me personally is that most of the people in this regenerative space don't look like me.

00:38:32.000 They're not good old boys that farmed industrially and went commanding.

00:38:37.000 They got degrees from...

00:38:39.000 Hipsters.

00:38:40.000 Hipsters, yeah, they're hipsters. 0.96

00:38:43.000 I probably ain't a hipster.

00:38:45.000 But I am one of the good old boys, and I still live in a community that there is nothing but industrial farming.

00:38:52.000 Zero.

00:38:53.000 And you're the only farm that lives the way yours is.

00:38:55.000 In my...

00:38:56.000 In your area.

00:38:58.000 Big area.

00:39:00.000 So, and I still, I mean, they're still my relatives and friends and neighbors, and we talk.

00:39:07.000 Do they talk to you about it, like, with, like, they're thinking about doing it as well?

00:39:11.000 No.

00:39:12.000 Don't forget that question.

00:39:13.000 That's a good question.

00:39:14.000 Okay, okay.

00:39:14.000 But you gotta let me go down the road.

00:39:16.000 I'm sorry, I'll let you go down the road.

00:39:17.000 It's Stuart Varney.

00:39:18.000 It's Stuart Varney.

00:39:19.000 He got all the time in the world, sir.

00:39:21.000 All right.

00:39:22.000 So when I talk to them about this, and that's the most common argument in the world, the one you just said.

00:39:29.000 You can't feed the world like that.

00:39:31.000 Right.

00:39:32.000 And I love that discussion.

00:39:34.000 They say, all right, let's have it.

00:39:36.000 But first, let's stipulate that the earth has a carrying capacity.

00:39:43.000 You can't keep...

00:39:44.000 I like how you said that.

00:39:45.000 All right.

00:39:46.000 Carrying.

00:39:47.000 Capacity.

00:39:48.000 Carrying.

00:39:48.000 Very serious.

00:39:49.000 Are you making fun of my southern accent?

00:39:51.000 No, it's beautiful.

00:39:51.000 It's beautiful.

00:39:53.000 It's the only one I got.

00:39:54.000 I like it.

00:39:55.000 The earth has a carrying capacity.

00:39:58.000 And, you know, we may be past it now.

00:40:01.000 I don't know.

00:40:02.000 When we double population, we may be past it.

00:40:05.000 But at some point...

00:40:06.000 It's all you can have.

00:40:08.000 Right.

00:40:09.000 So the question is, what farming method will carry the earth furthest in its carrying capacity?

00:40:19.000 Will get the earth the furthest?

00:40:21.000 That's really the argument.

00:40:23.000 And the industrial farming with all this misused technology that we're using today, If acres of land is the first thing we run out of, it is a much better system than mine.

00:40:40.000 You can feed more people with the industrial centralized commodity system than you can with my regenerative system.

00:40:49.000 I lose.

00:40:52.000 But what if land's not the first thing we run out of?

00:40:56.000 What if it's oil?

00:40:59.000 I don't use as much oil, petroleum.

00:41:01.000 What if it's water?

00:41:03.000 I don't use as much water.

00:41:05.000 What if it's the reductive plant foods like potassium and phosphate that we mine?

00:41:13.000 Mine's better.

00:41:15.000 I can feed more people.

00:41:16.000 What if it's other things?

00:41:19.000 What if it's the antibiotics that the pathogens are not resistant to?

00:41:26.000 My system's better.

00:41:27.000 I can feed more people.

00:41:29.000 What if it's the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico down there, right?

00:41:33.000 My system's better.

00:41:35.000 So from many, many, many perspectives, I can give you a list of as many as you want.

00:41:41.000 My system is less destructive and will carry more people on this planet than the current destructive linear factory model.

00:41:51.000 And your system is fairly self-sustainable in terms of, like, the feed the animals eat?

00:41:56.000 Or how much feed do you have to bring in?

00:41:58.000 No.

00:41:58.000 We bring in feed.

00:42:00.000 And you bring in feed for chickens?

00:42:01.000 You bring in feed for cows?

00:42:03.000 No?

00:42:04.000 The monogastrics.

00:42:06.000 The pigs and the poultry.

00:42:08.000 We bring in feed.

00:42:09.000 And what kind of feed do you bring in?

00:42:11.000 We bring in a bought, non-GMO, non-corn, non-sorry, expensive feed that we bring in.

00:42:19.000 But I could grow it myself.

00:42:20.000 That's the question.

00:42:22.000 I love closing loops, and there are some loops I have not closed.

00:42:28.000 And that's one?

00:42:29.000 Growing all my own non-ruminant feed, monogastric feed.

00:42:34.000 But with the cows, it's just grass?

00:42:36.000 Grass and hay.

00:42:37.000 And hay is just rolled up grass, right?

00:42:40.000 So when you do this, how much If you decided you wanted to go back to the factory farming system, how much more money would it cost and how much more money would you get out of it?

00:42:53.000 Is it more financially beneficial to do it the way you're doing it or more financially beneficial in a scale like the size of the scale that you're using right now?

00:43:01.000 Because it seems like it would cost a lot of money to get all that stuff.

00:43:05.000 To feed these cows, to make them fat real quick, and all the money for the hormones, and all the money for all these other things, where you just let them roam around and eat grass, but you don't get as much weight out of them.

00:43:13.000 So what's the tipping point?

00:43:15.000 So make no mistake.

00:43:16.000 Of all these inputs that the industrial model brings in, All of them are brought in to take cost out of production.

00:43:27.000 You spend money for the input, but ultimately it takes cost out of production.

00:43:31.000 What's the percentage?

00:43:33.000 How much of a percentage are you losing by doing it your way?

00:43:36.000 That is so situational.

00:43:39.000 Let me give you an example.

00:43:40.000 It's a great question, but I can't give you a short answer for it.

00:43:44.000 I would tell you that in the case of my grass-fed beef, My cost of production is probably 30% higher than the industrial model.

00:43:59.000 And you could argue, we could argue, if you told me 20 or 35, because I don't know, it's situational, but that's not going to be too far off.

00:44:12.000 Let's step over to poultry.

00:44:16.000 My cost for raising a chicken, a four-pound dressed chicken in Bluffton, Georgia, and putting them in a bag is like $4.50 or $0.60 a pound.

00:44:30.000 I see chicken on sale for $1.10 a pound.

00:44:35.000 So my cost of production for poultry is hundreds of percent higher.

00:44:41.000 And that's because the chicken lent itself to industrialization more handily than the cow did.

00:44:47.000 We took more cost out of production.

00:44:49.000 So when you say, how much higher is it?

00:44:53.000 That's how long it's a string.

00:44:56.000 But it's higher.

00:44:58.000 My cost of production is higher.

00:45:01.000 When you as a consumer ask me as a farmer to give up all the tools that reductionist science gave to take cost out of production, you add cost back to production.

00:45:14.000 Now...

00:45:16.000 I'm going to amend that.

00:45:17.000 I stand by it.

00:45:18.000 I'm going to amend it and say direct cost.

00:45:20.000 Direct cost, because long term you're destroying the soil.

00:45:24.000 The externalized cost, like destroying the soil, like losing antibiotics, like extinction of species, like the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

00:45:34.000 Like, if you believe in climate change, and I do, how much does a good hurricane cost?

00:45:39.000 How much does a good 100,000 acre wildfire cost?

00:45:44.000 And those externalized costs are not borne by the multinational companies or the people that incur them.

00:45:57.000 Right.

00:45:57.000 They're born by the average citizen.

00:45:59.000 By me and you and everybody else who pays taxes and get sick.

00:46:03.000 So that's a hidden cost.

00:46:05.000 Externalized.

00:46:06.000 So when you are around all these other people that are doing it in the industrialized way, and you're doing it in your sort of regenerative way, it doesn't have any influence on those people?

00:46:19.000 They see that you have a more...

00:46:22.000 Natural approach to farming.

00:46:24.000 It seems more prosperous.

00:46:25.000 You're getting all this attention.

00:46:26.000 People want to talk to you.

00:46:27.000 It's a fascinating subject and people gravitate towards it as a potential option.

00:46:32.000 Nobody's looking at the factory farming system going, oh wow, you stuff all those pigs together.

00:46:36.000 Tell me more about that.

00:46:37.000 What do you do?

00:46:38.000 You take all the chickens and you make them live in these abnormal cages and no one's excited about that.

00:46:43.000 But when people talk to you, they're excited about it.

00:46:46.000 Like, oh, that's interesting.

00:46:47.000 So you can just let the chickens roam around.

00:46:49.000 And you let the hogs roam around. 1.00

00:46:51.000 And you let the grass grow for the cows to just graze around on.

00:46:55.000 And this is how you sustain a farm.

00:46:58.000 That sounds intriguing to people because one of the big dilemmas about being a person who eats meat is contributing to this horrendous factory farming system.

00:47:07.000 That's what scares people.

00:47:08.000 All right.

00:47:09.000 That's a great question.

00:47:10.000 I got a great answer.

00:47:11.000 So let's just be crystal clear.

00:47:14.000 That these practitioners, these farmers that are farming industrially in that commoditized, centralized model are not bad people.

00:47:24.000 Right.

00:47:24.000 At all.

00:47:25.000 Not bad people at all.

00:47:27.000 You know, big food, big ag, they may be evil.

00:47:31.000 Multinational corporations, I think it's the equivalent of big tobacco in the 60s.

00:47:37.000 But those practitioners out there on the ground...

00:47:41.000 Are good people.

00:47:42.000 So why do they not move over in the model that you said?

00:47:50.000 Why do they not change over?

00:47:51.000 And the answer is...

00:47:55.000 First, there are three or four generations into farming this way.

00:47:59.000 You know, they're farming like daddy, granddaddy, maybe even great-granddaddy did.

00:48:02.000 So they might not even know how to change it.

00:48:04.000 Well, they don't see anything wrong with it.

00:48:07.000 Right.

00:48:07.000 You know, if you were raised with your, as most of us generation farmers are, with your role model being dad and granddad, and what they did, you're not going to say, this is bad.

00:48:19.000 Right.

00:48:20.000 It's hard to do.

00:48:20.000 So that's number one.

00:48:23.000 Number two is that most of these guys are not just invested in the farm.

00:48:28.000 Most of those cotton farmers, they own a million-dollar cotton picker. 1.00

00:48:33.000 Do you know a cotton picker can cost a million dollars? 1.00

00:48:35.000 No, it didn't.

00:48:36.000 It can't.

00:48:37.000 They own a million-dollar cotton picker, and you know what that thing will do? 1.00

00:48:39.000 Nothing but pick cotton. 0.91

00:48:40.000 Not a damn thing. 0.91

00:48:42.000 They also probably have ownership in a gin, cooperative gins. 0.95

00:48:47.000 You know what that thing does?

00:48:48.000 A gin is cotton.

00:48:49.000 Nothing else.

00:48:50.000 And so on.

00:48:53.000 Same with a grain farm, a grain combine, a grain elevator.

00:48:58.000 So that's one reason.

00:49:00.000 They're just so heavily invested.

00:49:01.000 Emotionally, they're invested.

00:49:03.000 Financially, they're invested.

00:49:05.000 Ancestrally.

00:49:07.000 Industrially.

00:49:08.000 Ancestrally.

00:49:09.000 Ancestrally?

00:49:09.000 Yeah, they're invested.

00:49:10.000 Their family's been running it forever.

00:49:12.000 It's part of the family.

00:49:14.000 On top of that, they're told every day by land-grant universities and big food and big ag, this is how you do it.

00:49:23.000 And we glamorize it, and it's fine.

00:49:29.000 So those are the motivational reasons things don't change much.

00:49:36.000 Let's talk about the business reasons.

00:49:37.000 So let's compare my business to a commodity farmer, a larger commodity farmer.

00:49:43.000 Both businesses are very capital intensive.

00:49:48.000 I've got $28 million worth of capital invested in my business.

00:49:52.000 Some of it's debt, some of it's equity, but that's what we've got.

00:49:55.000 They do too.

00:50:02.000 Both businesses are also low return.

00:50:08.000 My margins are not high and their margins are not high.

00:50:12.000 Both high capital investment, both low return.

00:50:16.000 My business is high risk.

00:50:20.000 Their business is not so high risk.

00:50:23.000 People have forever talked about how risky farming is.

00:50:28.000 You know, when you've got an arsenal of sides, pesticides, To throw at any problem you got.

00:50:35.000 When you got irrigation and the water is free where I live, other than the energy cost of getting it out of the ground.

00:50:43.000 When you've got crop insurance to mitigate risk, then compared to what I do, which is own the product all the way from when the calf hits the ground to the hamburger goes in your stomach,

00:51:01.000 When he comes, I recall, and it's over for me.

00:51:04.000 That won't happen with those guys.

00:51:08.000 That's a big difference.

00:51:11.000 High risk, high return, low risk, low return.

00:51:13.000 How long has that been going on?

00:51:15.000 And all those things that you're citing in terms of the investments that are involved, the cotton gins and the cotton pickers and all the different things that they need.

00:51:23.000 They'd have to restructure everything so it would take a significant investment to do that and then a big risk.

00:51:28.000 It would be so hard for those guys.

00:51:31.000 And I'm telling you because I did the same thing.

00:51:33.000 I was the same way.

00:51:34.000 Is there a way to provide this country with the cotton it needs?

00:51:41.000 All the other monocrops like corn and all the soybeans.

00:51:46.000 Is there a way to do that and do it regeneratively?

00:51:50.000 Well, I think it's the wrong question.

00:51:53.000 You know, what you said is there's a way to get us all we need farming that way.

00:51:58.000 I think there's a matter of living on what we can produce.

00:52:01.000 You know, how many...

00:52:03.000 So you think it's a matter of not doing it that way?

00:52:06.000 How many t-shirts you got to have?

00:52:08.000 Right.

00:52:09.000 You're talking about cotton.

00:52:10.000 I mean, how...

00:52:11.000 How many t-shirts you got?

00:52:12.000 I bet you got way more than you have to have.

00:52:15.000 Me?

00:52:15.000 Yeah, I definitely do.

00:52:16.000 If cotton was...

00:52:18.000 I don't keep up with it anymore, but I think cotton to the farmer now is close to a dollar a pound.

00:52:27.000 That's seed cotton.

00:52:28.000 That's coming out of the field.

00:52:32.000 That's actually for the lint after it's gin. 0.63

00:52:34.000 If cotton was $15 a pound, you'd probably have less t-shirts.

00:52:39.000 Right.

00:52:40.000 You think that would be the only consequence of growing less cotton?

00:52:44.000 I mean, do we absolutely use too much of it?

00:52:49.000 Do we have an accounting of how much the cotton gets used every day goes to waste?

00:52:54.000 You know, what I'm good at is regenerative land management and animal welfare and community building.

00:53:00.000 So those questions are valid and they're out there, but I think that So I think that the way we farm today is wastefully—it causes food or fiber to be wastefully abundant and obscenely cheap and— Just very damaging in the way it's produced.

00:53:28.000 So let's talk a minute.

00:53:30.000 Okay.

00:53:31.000 So I think what we're talking about here is those externalized expenses that we briefly mentioned earlier.

00:53:39.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:40.000 You know, there's USDA figures out there, and I think the last one I saw said the farmer gets like 14.3 or 7 cents of the consumer dollar.

00:53:52.000 Would you like some coffee?

00:53:53.000 I got water.

00:53:54.000 Okay.

00:53:57.000 The farmer gets 14.3 or 14.7 cents.

00:54:01.000 And your gut reaction is, that's unfair.

00:54:03.000 A farmer should get more than that. 0.97

00:54:04.000 And probably should.

00:54:06.000 Probably should.

00:54:08.000 But in the industrial model that we operate in, a farmer in this country can produce a 48,000 pound semi-truck load of anything And call Big Ag and they'll come get it and send you a check or an EFT. Whether it's oranges,

00:54:29.000 hogs, soybeans, corn, cows, cotton, it don't matter.

00:54:36.000 Big Ag, who I think of as being multinational corporations and being evil, but they'll come get it for you.

00:54:43.000 And it sends you some money.

00:54:45.000 Not much, 14.3 cents, but it sends you some money.

00:54:49.000 But then from that point forward, they take all the risk and provide all the service.

00:54:55.000 The farmer doesn't have to have $20-something million worth of assets like we do to further process.

00:55:04.000 We forget in this country that in the commodity market, consumers don't buy.

00:55:10.000 Cows and hogs and sheep.

00:55:12.000 They buy beef and pork and lamb.

00:55:15.000 You got to make that conversion.

00:55:17.000 And you make the conversion all in-house.

00:55:19.000 I do.

00:55:20.000 So you had a significant investment in order to be able to do that and you have the FDA facilities and all that in place.

00:55:29.000 This is a subject that is Being brought up more and more lately, because I think as time's going on and people are aware of all these things that they're finding in food, it becomes much more attractive to get food from a person like yourself.

00:55:46.000 How many people do you feed per year off of your farm?

00:55:53.000 This is what I call cowboy arithmetic.

00:55:56.000 I think that...

00:56:01.000 Now, you can verify this, but I think that consumers eat about $1,000 worth of meat a year, I think.

00:56:08.000 That's going to be close.

00:56:11.000 Well, if you assume that I fed, and I do $25 million, so what is that, 10,000 people?

00:56:21.000 So out of your place, it's 10,000 people.

00:56:24.000 Well, that's assuming that they buy every bit of protein they take in came from my farm.

00:56:29.000 Right.

00:56:30.000 I do the arithmetic right.

00:56:32.000 It's giving me pounds instead of money.

00:56:34.000 It says 274 pounds of meat.

00:56:37.000 I don't know what that would be in dollars.

00:56:39.000 Okay.

00:56:40.000 What would that be?

00:56:41.000 Three bucks a pound?

00:56:42.000 A thousand bucks?

00:56:43.000 Meat?

00:56:43.000 A thousand dollars is what I used.

00:56:46.000 Okay.

00:56:46.000 It works.

00:56:47.000 That's a lot.

00:56:49.000 So it's...

00:56:49.000 So if it's 25...

00:56:52.000 I do 25 million, and that's right.

00:56:55.000 And if it's a thousand bucks per person...

00:57:01.000 What is it?

00:57:02.000 1,000?

00:57:05.000 25 million?

00:57:06.000 Is that?

00:57:07.000 2,500 people?

00:57:08.000 Is that what it is?

00:57:09.000 What is that?

00:57:09.000 It's your phone's ringing.

00:57:11.000 Whoa. 1.00

00:57:11.000 Kill that, sorry. 1.00

00:57:13.000 Sorry. 0.98

00:57:13.000 It's okay. 0.98

00:57:16.000 Yeah.

00:57:17.000 25,000 is 25 million.

00:57:21.000 Okay.

00:57:21.000 Yeah.

00:57:23.000 So if you're looking at that amount of people, how much of farmland would we need to feed 300 million people?

00:57:32.000 How many farms like your own would we need? 0.98

00:57:36.000 This is the question of scalability, right?

00:57:38.000 And this doesn't include corn growth.

00:57:41.000 If you're assuming that animals would go back to being grass-fed, which would most certainly be healthier for everybody, healthier for the consumer and healthier for the animals, If you're assuming that, then you would have less monocrop agriculture that you would need for corn.

00:57:57.000 Is that correct?

00:57:58.000 That's correct.

00:57:59.000 Because most of what we grow today for corn either goes into corn syrup or it goes into animal feed.

00:58:07.000 That's a lot of it, right?

00:58:08.000 Ethanol.

00:58:09.000 Ethanol.

00:58:10.000 Is that a big one?

00:58:10.000 Is that the biggest one?

00:58:12.000 It's a big one.

00:58:13.000 So feed, ethanol, and corn syrup.

00:58:16.000 Three things that you could definitely at least get rid of the feed or significantly decrease and it'd probably be better for everybody.

00:58:24.000 And definitely significantly decrease our corn syrup usage.

00:58:27.000 That'd probably be better for everybody.

00:58:29.000 Those are two things that are abundant because of the fact that there's so much corn, correct?

00:58:35.000 Yeah.

00:58:35.000 I mean, I think the monogastrics, the pigs and poultry are going to have to have something besides forage.

00:58:41.000 They've got to have a grain of some sort.

00:58:44.000 Is there a better grain than corn, or is that the best one for them?

00:58:49.000 It's outside of my expertise, but I'm sure the answer is no, because corn has become the dominant crop it is because it lends itself so well to these outside inputs.

00:59:07.000 It's a fantastic assimilator of chemical nitrogen.

00:59:11.000 If it was another crop...

00:59:14.000 You wouldn't put as much nitrogen and you wouldn't make as much calories of production.

00:59:18.000 So corn didn't... 0.99

00:59:20.000 It's like corn, it's a good example.

00:59:24.000 Everything that's been done in agriculture for the last 80 years has been done for efficiency only.

00:59:33.000 There's nothing wrong with efficiency.

00:59:35.000 Nothing wrong with that.

00:59:37.000 In fact, it's incumbent upon me as a businessman to operate efficiently.

00:59:40.000 But when efficiency is all you're worried about, you pay the price in resilience.

00:59:48.000 Efficiency and resilience are like yin and yang.

00:59:52.000 You give up one for the other.

00:59:59.000 That is the dance, right?

01:00:01.000 Efficiency and resilience, and it's only what you're talking about when you're talking about people examining the soil and realizing the oxidation, realizing the damage to the carbon in the soil.

01:00:12.000 What are the steps that we can take to mitigate that other than having farms run regeneratively like yours?

01:00:19.000 If someone wants to continue with that industrialized model, But they're using all these herbicides and pesticides and it's destroying the soil in some way.

01:00:28.000 What can be done to correct that?

01:00:30.000 Or are we on a path that we can't get off of where we're not going to have good topsoil anymore?

01:00:37.000 We're definitely on a path where we're not going to have good topsoil anymore.

01:00:40.000 Definitely.

01:00:41.000 There's no question about that.

01:00:42.000 So what happens when that takes place?

01:00:48.000 We'll become far less productive as an agricultural industry.

01:00:55.000 Can I go back?

01:00:59.000 Yes, please.

01:01:00.000 Go wherever you want, sir.

01:01:01.000 All right.

01:01:02.000 Have you done a podcast before?

01:01:05.000 Not like this.

01:01:06.000 No.

01:01:06.000 Well, this is the best part about it is you can go anywhere you want.

01:01:09.000 Yeah.

01:01:10.000 So have you ever heard of Savory Institute?

01:01:14.000 No, I have not.

01:01:15.000 You ought to look at it.

01:01:17.000 Savory Institute.

01:01:18.000 Yes.

01:01:19.000 It's not like Savory Food.

01:01:21.000 It's a guy named Alan Savory.

01:01:23.000 He's a farmer from Zimbabwe who is touted as being the father of regenerative land management, pasture range management.

01:01:35.000 And Savory International is a group that is devoted to that, and my farm is a Savory hub.

01:01:43.000 I actually went to Zimbabwe and took my training under Island Savory some years ago in regenerative land management.

01:01:51.000 And this is after years and years of industrial farming?

01:01:54.000 Yeah.

01:01:54.000 You still needed to take courses?

01:01:56.000 What did you need to learn there?

01:01:58.000 How to completely rethink about it.

01:02:01.000 So, and we can talk more about that, but the main point I want to make is, in the savory thought process, we talk about the difference in a complex system And a complicated system.

01:02:22.000 So this microphone thing we're working on here is a very complicated system.

01:02:30.000 And this computer this young man is working on over here is a very complicated system. 0.96

01:02:36.000 And to me what that means is there's a lot of shit going on to make it work. 0.92

01:02:41.000 And when one component quits working, it don't work no more. 0.96

01:02:46.000 And reductionist science works great on those very linear, complicated systems.

01:02:54.000 A factory is kind of the ultimate complicated system.

01:02:57.000 Very linear and very, lends itself to scale, which lends itself to efficiency.

01:03:08.000 And that is the model that my dad's generation and later my generation applied to agriculture.

01:03:17.000 Let's talk about agriculture.

01:03:19.000 My farm, like your body, is a very complex living system.

01:03:26.000 There's a lot going on in both of them to make it work.

01:03:30.000 But if one component quits, everything kind of morphs and it keeps working, right?

01:03:38.000 So in that scenario, it doesn't lend itself to reductive science as well because of the unintended consequences, that morphing we're talking about.

01:03:54.000 Living systems are complex systems.

01:03:58.000 Reductive science easily becomes misapplied to those systems because they have those unintended consequences that are not easily recognizable.

01:04:08.000 We talked about some of them.

01:04:11.000 Somebody taking steroids or me using fertilizer and pesticides on my land.

01:04:18.000 Reductive science applied to a living system.

01:04:21.000 Living systems are very cyclical.

01:04:24.000 They're not super scalable.

01:04:27.000 They are super replicable.

01:04:30.000 You can have more of them.

01:04:32.000 So this is finally getting back to your question about feeding LA. Yeah.

01:04:37.000 So we have, for the last 80 years, been feeding bigger and bigger and bigger cities using the factory model, applying that reductive science to a living system,

01:04:54.000 and it had unintended consequences.

01:04:56.000 Well, some of us think we probably ought not do that so much anymore.

01:05:02.000 And if we do, then we need to move towards treating that cyclical biome, your body or form, in a manner that is favorable to the cycles of nature.

01:05:19.000 Because those cycles of nature are essential and they must all work together to have your body working good or my farm working good.

01:05:28.000 So let's talk about the cycles of nature just a minute.

01:05:33.000 First, let me tell you that industrial farming breaks the cycles of nature.

01:05:41.000 No species has ever done that before.

01:05:44.000 But it breaks us off.

01:05:46.000 You and I are the ape that learned to eat meat.

01:05:51.000 And when we learned to eat meat, we became less apish and ultimately we became the first species to really get good at technology.

01:06:02.000 We applied the technology to this system, this cyclical system, and broke the cycles of nature.

01:06:09.000 The cycles of nature, to me, are the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the mineral cycle, the microbial cycle, energy cycle.

01:06:19.000 There's probably a lot more that we don't recognize.

01:06:23.000 And when we broke the cycles of nature using those industrial tools, we ceased to produce that abundance.

01:06:31.000 That one plus one is three.

01:06:33.000 That symbiosis, you mentioned symbiosis earlier.

01:06:36.000 So that's...

01:06:40.000 What's important to us in my space is that we restart these cycles of nature.

01:06:48.000 You don't use reductive science, you use experiential wisdom.

01:06:53.000 It's like the other side of reductionist science.

01:06:59.000 And we're able to restart the cycles of nature.

01:07:03.000 That's what I've done on my farm.

01:07:04.000 And Could you please show that water video for me, please?

01:07:12.000 This is one cycle of nature, but I want to talk a little bit about how they all tie together.

01:07:17.000 And is this your farm?

01:07:18.000 It is my farm.

01:07:20.000 It's my farm out of neighbor's.

01:07:21.000 That's coming off my farm, and that's coming off a neighbor's farm.

01:07:26.000 See that?

01:07:27.000 Oh boy.

01:07:28.000 So, your farm, the water runoff is clear.

01:07:32.000 Their farm, the water runoff is a very muddy, dark brown.

01:07:38.000 That's crazy.

01:07:39.000 So what we're seeing is there's a pivot of corn.

01:07:43.000 So that water, that's my neighbor.

01:07:51.000 That's across the road from White Oak Pastures.

01:07:54.000 They're good people.

01:07:56.000 They're fine people.

01:07:57.000 They're my relatives.

01:07:58.000 They're good people.

01:08:01.000 But they farm their land very conventionally, or someone does.

01:08:05.000 So what is in that water that's causing it to be that color?

01:08:08.000 Well, there's no good news, but the good news is subsoil.

01:08:12.000 The topsoil is gone.

01:08:16.000 Because of the way they've been running their farm, the topsoil's gone.

01:08:19.000 So that's all subsoil.

01:08:21.000 See, that was corn. 0.78

01:08:23.000 And it's not unusual to put several hundred pounds of chemical fertilizer per acre on corn.

01:08:29.000 So a lot of that several hundred pounds of chemical fertilizer is in that water as well.

01:08:35.000 It's also very common to use, in fact ubiquitous, to use herbicide, insecticide, some fungicides, all that.

01:08:47.000 So those sides are in that water too.

01:08:50.000 And there's no...

01:08:53.000 No, no, no.

01:09:08.000 Because it looks like those fish...

01:09:09.000 That is like the craziest line.

01:09:13.000 When you look at the line there, the line of the mark between your land and his land, it's about as clear as it gets. 0.90

01:09:20.000 Literally, no pun intended.

01:09:22.000 Your side is clear water. 0.99

01:09:23.000 His side is disgusting. 0.60

01:09:25.000 Let me answer the fish question. 0.63

01:09:28.000 I'm not doing fish studies, but that water...

01:09:31.000 Welcome to my show.

01:09:42.000 Welcome to my show.

01:09:48.000 There you go.

01:09:49.000 There's a picture of my farm on the left, that same farm you just saw on the right.

01:09:54.000 Jesus.

01:09:55.000 So, Apalachicola Bay used to be famous for its oysters, its wonderful oysters.

01:10:03.000 But they have banned oystering in Apalachicola Bay because the numbers are down.

01:10:09.000 So, An unintended consequence of that is the death of the fishery.

01:10:17.000 And, you know, an oyster purifies 50 gallons of water a day.

01:10:22.000 That's what an oyster, you know how they work, that filtration system, right?

01:10:26.000 So not only do we not have good Apalachicola Bay oysters to eat, we're also missing out on that Let's say one more word about that.

01:10:35.000 You talked about the quality of the water, maybe versus not.

01:10:41.000 What you couldn't know is the quantity.

01:10:45.000 So I'm not sure exactly how big the watershed is coming off my farm, but probably a couple thousand acres.

01:10:54.000 And I'm not sure how big the watershed coming off my neighbors, but probably a couple hundred acres.

01:11:02.000 So not only is the quality way different, but the quantity.

01:11:09.000 It's pouring out.

01:11:11.000 You can see it pouring out.

01:11:12.000 Let me explain that to you.

01:11:14.000 So that's the water cycle.

01:11:16.000 Now the carbon cycle, right?

01:11:18.000 All these cycles work together.

01:11:20.000 So because of the way we've managed my land for the last 25 years, my organic matter in my soil is 5%.

01:11:31.000 You can look on my website, whiteoakpastures.com, under the Land Stewardship tab, and there is a LCA, Life Cycle Assessment, that was done on my farm.

01:11:42.000 It'll show that over the last 20 years, the organic model on my farm has gone from a half percent to five percent.

01:11:53.000 And every bit of that carbon came from greenhouse gases that were put through my ruminant animals and back out.

01:12:00.000 More about that in a minute.

01:12:03.000 But the reason for the water is 1% organic.

01:12:08.000 An inch of rain on an acre of land is about 27,000 gallons of water.

01:12:16.000 If it rains one inch on an acre, that's 27,000 gallons of water.

01:12:21.000 1% organic matter will absorb a 1-inch rain event.

01:12:27.000 Because my land's over 5% organic model, I can absorb a 5-inch rain event if it comes slowly.

01:12:35.000 Not in 30 minutes, but if it comes slowly.

01:12:39.000 The land that you saw, my neighbors, would be about a half percent organic model.

01:12:45.000 A half a percent?

01:12:46.000 Yeah, that's what mine used to be.

01:12:47.000 That's a function of industrial farming.

01:12:50.000 And how did you turn it around?

01:12:52.000 Animal impact.

01:12:54.000 Period.

01:12:55.000 Animal impact.

01:12:56.000 And this is what you learned from the savory method?

01:13:00.000 Correct.

01:13:01.000 And so, like, how long did it take for you to do that?

01:13:04.000 It seems like...

01:13:05.000 20 years.

01:13:06.000 20 years for it to be where it's at now.

01:13:09.000 Correct.

01:13:10.000 And it's a slow, gradual process of improvement?

01:13:13.000 It is.

01:13:14.000 Wow.

01:13:14.000 So you got to be very committed to that because it's costing you money.

01:13:17.000 It's like you're 30 plus or somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% less productive in terms of...

01:13:23.000 Yeah.

01:13:24.000 And then on top of that, this is a long-term investment to take this industrialized property and turn it into...

01:13:30.000 What it is now.

01:13:31.000 Wow.

01:13:32.000 Which harkens back to your question about why don't my neighbors...

01:13:34.000 Of course.

01:13:35.000 It's too much work.

01:13:36.000 There's the answer.

01:13:37.000 Yeah, there's the answer.

01:13:37.000 And expense and risk.

01:13:39.000 And you have to be ideologically committed to doing it that way.

01:13:42.000 You do.

01:13:43.000 To justify doing it.

01:13:44.000 You have to have a very generational view of things.

01:13:47.000 Yeah.

01:13:54.000 Is what we learn in accounting, you know, the quarterly report or the annual report.

01:14:00.000 You'd never do this.

01:14:02.000 But if you have a generational view, which is easy for us because we're six generations on the farm, then it becomes more tolerable.

01:14:12.000 Do you think it's possible that Especially when you're talking about like your neighbor who's only got 200 acres and you know they're probably very productive with those 200 acres doing it that way as opposed to doing it the way you're doing it.

01:14:27.000 How many of these without that sort of long-term 20-year investment Is there a way that the government can incentivize turning farms over that would be ultimately beneficial to everybody?

01:14:41.000 Is there a way?

01:14:42.000 Because there is some sort of government incentivizing, they're subsidizing, right, for certain crops that they started doing during the war, right?

01:14:51.000 Because they wanted to make sure that they had a surplus of certain grains and food and things like that.

01:14:56.000 That's how that all started, correct?

01:14:59.000 Supply management, yes, correct.

01:15:00.000 Is there a way to do that to turn farms into more self-sustaining the way yours is?

01:15:06.000 Well, that question assumes the government wants to do that.

01:15:11.000 Well, if the government wants the environment ultimately to be healthy, that seems like the only way.

01:15:17.000 At least someone sent them that video of your river, because that's crazy.

01:15:20.000 So let me explain how the farm – the farm bill is an incredible – farm program, farm bill, right?

01:15:27.000 It's an incredible cost to the government.

01:15:31.000 But let me tell you how it's written.

01:15:33.000 Okay.

01:15:34.000 Big Ag and Big Food decide what they want.

01:15:37.000 And then they hire lobbyists, and those guys go to Washington and write the program, or get the program written through aides, congressional aides, or Senate aides.

01:15:51.000 And then it's past that.

01:15:54.000 So if Big Ag and Big Food don't want to change, it's not going to happen through the government.

01:16:04.000 To exacerbate that, Now, I don't want to get sued by anybody, so I'm just going to tell you what I believe.

01:16:18.000 In the case of USDA, those bureaucrats, for the most part, I'm sure it's not all, but many of those bureaucrats that become very senior in USDA, And I'm sure it's the Defense Department, too.

01:16:34.000 Post-retirement, they get really great jobs with big ag and big food.

01:16:40.000 And I think that there's a...

01:16:44.000 I can give you some examples, actually.

01:16:46.000 But I think there's a culture of catering to big ag and big food because of the rewards that become post-retirement.

01:16:57.000 You know, we...

01:16:59.000 I'll give you an example.

01:17:00.000 So we had an issue when I first started raising poultry outside in the pasture.

01:17:08.000 We had a predation problem by bald eagles.

01:17:13.000 It was kind of a good sign in a pervert way because we didn't have bald eagles.

01:17:20.000 They were outside my ecosystem.

01:17:21.000 We put poultry on the ground.

01:17:23.000 We had bald eagles.

01:17:25.000 And when the bald eagles first came back to my ecosystem, they were predating on my birds and just hammering me economically.

01:17:36.000 Now, we finally figured out how to prevent it operationally.

01:17:41.000 But for a couple of years there, 2015, 2016, we had huge economic losses because of eagle predation of my pastured poultry.

01:17:52.000 Wow. 0.85

01:17:53.000 How many chickens can I kill them? 1.00

01:17:54.000 Dozens. 0.99

01:17:55.000 Dozens per day.

01:17:56.000 They weren't killing them and eating.

01:17:57.000 They were just killing them and having fun.

01:18:00.000 Really?

01:18:01.000 Yeah.

01:18:01.000 It was bad.

01:18:02.000 Dozens a day?

01:18:03.000 Yes.

01:18:05.000 They were just having fun?

01:18:07.000 Yeah.

01:18:08.000 Were they eating any of them?

01:18:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:18:09.000 They were eating some.

01:18:10.000 But some of them they were just killing for a goof.

01:18:12.000 Yeah. 0.58

01:18:13.000 Wow.

01:18:14.000 So, nature is not cruel.

01:18:19.000 And nature is not kind.

01:18:22.000 But nature is pure and beautiful, and that's just what happens.

01:18:26.000 That's just what happens.

01:18:28.000 So if you've got a cat, let it find a nest of mice and see if it doesn't kill them all. 0.99

01:18:33.000 Probably won't eat them all, but kill them all. 0.96

01:18:34.000 We can go on and on about that. 1.00

01:18:37.000 But anyway, back on this bureaucracy.

01:18:39.000 But how did you solve that problem?

01:18:41.000 Let me tell you that in a minute.

01:18:42.000 Okay.

01:18:42.000 So, Stuart.

01:18:50.000 I learned that there is a program, a federal USDA program, called LIP, Livestock Indemnity Program.

01:19:00.000 And the purpose of that program is to indemnify stockmen If a protected species is hammering your livestock, like not a coyote, not a bobcat, but a bald eagle, a timber wolf,

01:19:16.000 or a grizzly bear, it's to identify the farmer.

01:19:21.000 So I went to my local USDA office and they told me what to do to prove my losses.

01:19:30.000 And I did it.

01:19:33.000 Painstaking, record-keeping, but I did it.

01:19:36.000 And the local county office, the guys that had seen the predation, approved it.

01:19:42.000 When I got to the state office, they denied my claim.

01:19:46.000 And they said that I had to prove every single one that got killed.

01:19:51.000 Well, you know, if an eagle swoops in and grabs a chicken, I can't prove it.

01:19:57.000 So they did not pay me my money.

01:20:00.000 And I went through the National Appeals Division.

01:20:04.000 This is 2015, 2016. I'm still at war with USDA to get the $190,000 they owe me for those two years' losses.

01:20:17.000 And I keep winning, and they keep appealing, and they won't pay me.

01:20:22.000 Now, I'm pretty sure there's somebody pretty highly placed in USDA. That might have told big poultry, hey, look what a good boy I'm being.

01:20:33.000 I'm not letting this farmer get his money.

01:20:35.000 Because big poultry, for the most part, doesn't like pastured production, independent production like ours.

01:20:41.000 Do you think that's what it is?

01:20:42.000 Or do you think they just don't want to give money away?

01:20:45.000 Oh, no.

01:20:46.000 I think so.

01:20:47.000 So do you think that they're financially trying to punish you because you're an independent agriculture company?

01:20:53.000 I do.

01:20:53.000 Yeah?

01:20:53.000 I do.

01:20:53.000 How did you stop the eagles from killing your chickens?

01:20:57.000 A brilliant poultry manager of ours.

01:21:00.000 I wish I could tell you this was my idea, but it wasn't.

01:21:02.000 A brilliant poultry production manager that worked for me figured it out.

01:21:08.000 And here's the deal.

01:21:09.000 We've got these chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas, and ducks out in the pasture.

01:21:15.000 And they're out in the open.

01:21:17.000 And we've got guardian dogs to protect them. 0.55

01:21:21.000 Guardian dogs are Great Pyrenees, Akbash, Anatolian Shepherds.

01:21:27.000 And they do a fantastic job protecting my poultry from mammal predators.

01:21:36.000 Mammal predators to us are coyotes, foxes, bobcats, raccoons, skunks, da-da-da.

01:21:42.000 They do a great job.

01:21:44.000 Because those mammal predators are nocturnal.

01:21:50.000 And the dogs are nocturnal.

01:21:52.000 So we just don't lose virtually none to mammal, sharp-toothed predators.

01:22:00.000 But as soon as the sun would come up, the dogs would go to the woods and go to sleep.

01:22:07.000 And the birds had their way, the raptors had my way with my poultry.

01:22:13.000 So our poultry manager, it took him a couple of years to get it worked out, but he did.

01:22:19.000 We started putting up electric netting way around the area that the birds were, and we had to move it a lot.

01:22:30.000 But that kept the dogs in.

01:22:31.000 And when the dogs stayed in, the birds, the raptors, were not nearly as likely to just spree kill.

01:22:41.000 They might still fly in and get one and fly off.

01:22:44.000 You know, I don't mind that.

01:22:45.000 That's like tithing to nature, right?

01:22:48.000 I like that perspective.

01:22:50.000 Yeah, it is like tithing.

01:22:51.000 Yeah, you're growing prey animals.

01:22:54.000 Yeah.

01:22:54.000 Every now and then they get snatched up.

01:22:56.000 They got ice creatures too.

01:22:57.000 They deserve to be there.

01:22:58.000 Yeah.

01:22:58.000 I just don't want them wantonly killing thousands of dollars worth of poultry.

01:23:04.000 Yeah.

01:23:06.000 So it's the dogs.

01:23:08.000 That's who kept it.

01:23:09.000 It's interesting that there's some animals that are protected even when they're not endangered anymore.

01:23:14.000 People feel that way about the bald eagle in places where they're abundant, like in some spots in Alaska.

01:23:20.000 It's crazy how many eagles there are.

01:23:22.000 Do you like coffee, water, anything?

01:23:24.000 I'm going to get some water.

01:23:25.000 Can we talk a minute about this animal thing?

01:23:29.000 Yeah.

01:23:30.000 And the relationship people have with animals.

01:23:33.000 Yeah.

01:23:35.000 So you know what I do for a living.

01:23:37.000 I produce animals and I slaughter them and I sell the meat.

01:23:43.000 And despite that, when somebody tells me that they are vegetarian or vegan, I have full respect for that.

01:23:53.000 I mean, that is a lifestyle choice that everybody gets to make.

01:23:58.000 You can choose your sexual orientation or whatever you like.

01:24:07.000 You can choose your religion.

01:24:08.000 You can choose what you want to eat.

01:24:09.000 That's That's the individuals to choose.

01:24:13.000 And I would go to war to defend a person who said that they're vegetarian or vegan because they couldn't bear the idea of eating a live animal.

01:24:26.000 I get it.

01:24:27.000 That's fine.

01:24:29.000 If you tell me it's because it's yucky, the mouthfeel, I respect it.

01:24:34.000 That's fine.

01:24:36.000 But I'm not going to let you tell me that you won't eat animals because they're destroying the earth when they're raised like I'm raising them.

01:24:45.000 Right. 0.92

01:24:45.000 I will not let you bring that junk science on me. 0.92

01:24:49.000 And that is junk science. 1.00

01:24:50.000 It's fucking junk science. 1.00

01:24:51.000 Let me give it back to you. 1.00

01:24:53.000 So, I just told you that my farm...

01:24:55.000 I showed you that my farm...

01:24:58.000 It has 5% organic model.

01:25:01.000 You couldn't see the 5%, but you could see the difference in the water for sure.

01:25:05.000 You know where all that, and an acre slice of soil weighs about 2 million pounds.

01:25:14.000 You can Google it.

01:25:18.000 If I went from a half percent to over 5%, that's 5% of 2 million pounds.

01:25:24.000 I think that's 100,000 pounds of carbon.

01:25:27.000 Get it?

01:25:28.000 Per acre.

01:25:29.000 I didn't put any carbon out of there.

01:25:33.000 Every bit of that carbon, that 100,000 pounds per acre on 3,200 acres, used to be greenhouse gas.

01:25:43.000 That plant, through the magic of photosynthesis, Breathed in that carbon and other gases, the carbon dioxide and other gases, and turned it into fat and protein and carbohydrate that is the plant.

01:25:58.000 Some of it above the ground, some of it below the ground in roots.

01:26:04.000 My cows or sheep or goats ate that plant and some of that carbon went to make beef or pork or beef or lamb or goat Some of it went out as manure.

01:26:21.000 Some of it was put up as flatulence or burping or whatever.

01:26:27.000 And a lot of it went into the root in the ground and was sequestered there for a time.

01:26:35.000 When that plant grows, a growing plant is like a pump.

01:26:39.000 It's pulling carbon from the air, putting some of it under the ground.

01:26:44.000 The animal bites it off.

01:26:47.000 Those roots start to slough off until it regrows.

01:26:51.000 So it's literally just like a pumping carbon.

01:26:54.000 So not only is ruminant livestock not destroying the earth, it is a serious mitigator of climate change.

01:27:06.000 As long as it's done your way.

01:27:08.000 Bingo.

01:27:09.000 Bingo.

01:27:10.000 Not animals being hauled corn in the feedlot.

01:27:13.000 No, no, no, no, no.

01:27:13.000 I'm not feeding it.

01:27:14.000 So they do have an argument for that then.

01:27:17.000 I agree with him.

01:27:19.000 Yeah.

01:27:20.000 We're on the same side there.

01:27:21.000 So it's not just raising animals.

01:27:24.000 It's raising animals against the cycle of nature.

01:27:27.000 Exactly.

01:27:28.000 Exactly.

01:27:31.000 And that's what we're dealing with.

01:27:32.000 And that's what you see polluting that river.

01:27:35.000 It's going out into the Gulf of Mexico, which is horrific.

01:27:38.000 Just looking at that, that seems like a natural disaster that someone should regulate.

01:27:44.000 That shouldn't be okay.

01:27:46.000 It shouldn't be standard.

01:27:47.000 You're looking at what that's doing to that water.

01:27:49.000 That's horrible.

01:27:50.000 That should not be normal and just accept it.

01:27:53.000 If it was a construction site, you wouldn't be able to do it.

01:27:56.000 Right.

01:27:56.000 Exactly.

01:27:57.000 That's a perfect way to put it.

01:27:58.000 That was gypsum board.

01:28:00.000 If you were breaking up wall board and you had all that stuff going down into the river, people, they would cite you for poisoning.

01:28:06.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:28:07.000 You're polluting the river.

01:28:09.000 All right.

01:28:09.000 So let's go back to...

01:28:11.000 And I'm also telling you that as a...

01:28:15.000 As a practitioner of regenerative agriculture, a guy who's regenerated thousands of acres of land, you cannot cost-effectively do it without ruminant impact.

01:28:28.000 You have to say, I'm going to take this degraded land and put it back pristine the way it was before Europeans got here. 0.99

01:28:41.000 But I'm not going to put the animal impact in it.

01:28:45.000 That's like you saying, I'm going to use my mama's recipe to cook brownies, but I'm not going to put the sugar in there.

01:28:55.000 It's not the same brownie. 1.00

01:28:56.000 And that evolution of that land without animal impact is not the same.

01:29:01.000 And you need the animals to make the manure, to make the cycle, to have it all work the way it normally naturally would.

01:29:08.000 Absolutely.

01:29:08.000 And that's...

01:29:10.000 Zero carbon imprint.

01:29:13.000 That's the idea.

01:29:14.000 Or negative.

01:29:15.000 Negative in our case.

01:29:16.000 In your case, you're actually extracting carbon.

01:29:19.000 Correct.

01:29:20.000 So that LCA I mentioned to you showed that we We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, whatever that is, for every pound of grass-fed beef we sell.

01:29:38.000 Ironically, the same Environmental engineers, Qantas, did an LCA on, I think it was Impossible Burger, Impossible Meats.

01:29:51.000 And they're emitting 3.5 pounds for every pound of Impossible Burger.

01:29:57.000 So if you want to have a zero footprint for every pound of Impossible Burger you eat, you've got to eat a pound of mine.

01:30:05.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:30:07.000 Because if you ask the average person, they think that that stuff's good for you and it's good for the environment and that if we don't get away from beef.

01:30:14.000 It's just like people have these narrow perspectives, these narratives that get fed to them.

01:30:18.000 And so they just repeat it over and over again.

01:30:21.000 But obviously when talking to someone like you who's an actual farmer, you realize how complex The organization is and how much time is involved and how much effort is involved.

01:30:32.000 Very few people have put a lot of thought into what it takes to be a farmer.

01:30:37.000 And what you were talking about, how it's high investment, low yield, and a lot of work.

01:30:43.000 And most people, I don't think, are aware of it.

01:30:45.000 They just want to get a cheeseburger. 0.94

01:30:47.000 They just want to be able to pull into In-N-Out, get yourself a cheeseburger, and don't think at all about where that cow came from and how much work is involved in bringing that cow to you and how fragile that whole system is.

01:30:59.000 Well, I'm not glorifying what I do for a living.

01:31:03.000 It doesn't need to be glorified.

01:31:05.000 It's just what I do for a living.

01:31:07.000 I am trying to show you where we went so badly wrong.

01:31:10.000 The application of that siloed, myopic reductionist science to this complex, cyclical system.

01:31:25.000 And also, this is fairly recent in human history.

01:31:28.000 This is not like a new thing that people have been doing for hundreds of years.

01:31:32.000 The industrial system is 80 years old or so.

01:31:36.000 In my mind, when I went to the University of Georgia, I learned animal nutrition from a professor who had a doctorate degree in animal nutrition. 0.94

01:31:51.000 And he knew all about animal nutrition, but he didn't know shit about the soil. 0.72

01:31:56.000 And I learned the health aspect from a veterinarian who knew all about the health aspect, but didn't know crap about photosynthesizing plants. 0.79

01:32:07.000 And you see everybody in a separate discipline.

01:32:11.000 And you get away from the holism that is what a biome is, what a complex system is.

01:32:20.000 It's like if you were watching a ball game through a wood fence and you just had one board going.

01:32:29.000 And the third baseman was there, and you were the third base coach.

01:32:34.000 You know exactly what he's doing, and you got it.

01:32:37.000 You have no idea what's going on on first.

01:32:39.000 Right.

01:32:40.000 So you can't be a good coach, because you can't see The whole bone, the whole system.

01:32:49.000 Yeah.

01:32:50.000 Makes sense.

01:32:51.000 And they don't teach a course on running whole systems?

01:32:56.000 Like, if someone wants to be a young farmer, someone's interested in farming now, do they teach a course other than that savory type course?

01:33:05.000 Do they teach something like that in American universities?

01:33:07.000 You know, the only university in this country that I know of...

01:33:12.000 You're talking about land-grant universities for the ag schools, right?

01:33:15.000 There's one renegade ag school, Michigan State University, that is actually a savory hub like us.

01:33:23.000 And it's that way because there's a powerful, one powerful professor there who gets it, a guy named Dr. Jason Roundtree.

01:33:32.000 And he has been influential enough in that school, he has brought them in this direction.

01:33:40.000 But land-grant universities are not going to be where the change comes from, if there is a change.

01:33:46.000 I don't know if there's going to be a change or not.

01:33:47.000 And there's several reasons for that.

01:33:49.000 One is, you know where those land-grant universities are getting most of their funding these days?

01:33:54.000 Industry.

01:33:56.000 Oh, boy.

01:33:57.000 Big ag, big food.

01:33:59.000 So, A, they're not incentivized.

01:34:02.000 B, another...

01:34:07.000 The first symptom of the linear factory model is it lends itself to a how-to manual.

01:34:15.000 You can write a how-to manual, somebody can, on how to put a rocket ship on the moon.

01:34:22.000 It'd be a big old thick book, but you can do it.

01:34:25.000 You can't write a how-to manual on operating Joe Rogan's body or operating or running White Oak Pastures.

01:34:33.000 It's too situational.

01:34:38.000 Land-grant universities need to be able to offer that how-to manual.

01:34:43.000 That's what you do.

01:34:43.000 You go in and you learn how beef cattle production or poultry production or agronomy or whatever it is.

01:34:51.000 So the change won't come from university systems.

01:34:57.000 I don't know if the change is going to come or not, but we've said it won't come from big food, they're making too much money.

01:35:03.000 It won't come from big ag, they're making too much money.

01:35:06.000 It won't come from the government because they're getting the money that big ag and big food is giving them.

01:35:12.000 It won't come from the university system because...

01:35:14.000 It won't come from farmers because of what I told you about their commitment and ownership to the status quo.

01:35:24.000 So if there is a change, If.

01:35:28.000 It'll come from consumers.

01:35:30.000 And I don't know if it'll come from consumers or not, because we're hopelessly addicted to obscenely cheap food.

01:35:40.000 Cheap and fast.

01:35:41.000 And easy and thoughtless.

01:35:45.000 This brings back to what we were talking about earlier that we skipped over, but I wanted to bring back to it.

01:35:52.000 You're talking about, is it normal to live where 18 million people live in one place like that?

01:35:58.000 Okay, so, I'm not an urban planner, but I can tell you what I know about the centralization of the food supply.

01:36:11.000 So, the difference in the way I farm today, and the way my dad and I farmed, and the way my great-granddad and granddad farmed us, Those guys then, and me now, are focused on,

01:36:28.000 hyper-focused on the land, because that's our savings account.

01:36:34.000 That's our wealth.

01:36:38.000 The animals, that's our checking account.

01:36:41.000 They're coming and going.

01:36:42.000 We're raising them.

01:36:43.000 And the local economy, that's our market.

01:36:53.000 When we industrialized, commoditized, and centralized agriculture, the industrialization was hell on the land and the water and the environment.

01:37:04.000 We already talked about that.

01:37:06.000 That's the industrialization.

01:37:08.000 The centralization was hell on the local economy.

01:37:14.000 Centralizing agriculture impoverished rural America.

01:37:20.000 It caused it to be financially irrelevant, and it just wasn't needed anymore.

01:37:25.000 And when something is not needed anymore and is irrelevant, it atrophies away.

01:37:30.000 And that's what happened.

01:37:32.000 And then the last one is commoditization.

01:37:34.000 I don't want to talk about it, too.

01:37:36.000 But let me tell you about centralization and how the industrialization impoverished it and farming the way we farm re-enriches it.

01:37:50.000 So 25 years ago when I started changing, I had typically about three employees, minimum wage, payroll would be $1,000 a week,

01:38:09.000 Today, fast forward the way I farm, I got 180 employees, 180-something.

01:38:17.000 My payroll is $100,000 every Friday in one of the poorest counties in America.

01:38:28.000 And the town has gone from, during that period, being a ghost town, literally, to a little destination.

01:38:40.000 And the reason is, White Oak Passage is the largest private employer in the county.

01:38:47.000 And it's an economic driver.

01:38:50.000 And of the 180-something employees I got, some of them are local.

01:38:55.000 A lot of them moved in.

01:38:57.000 And we moved those people in.

01:38:59.000 And they needed a place to eat and sleep and drink and shop and play.

01:39:03.000 And we provided it.

01:39:06.000 And Bluffton, Georgia is a nice little town.

01:39:09.000 You would enjoy bringing your wife and kids to Bluffton, Georgia and spending a few days.

01:39:16.000 Prior to our change, we got a store, we got cabins for lodging, we got an RV park, we got a restaurant, we got a leather shop, we got a bunch of stuff, stuff that is commerce.

01:39:32.000 Prior to us making those economic changes, the only thing you could buy in Bluffton, Georgia was a postage stamp.

01:39:41.000 There was not a single new housing start in Bluffton, Georgia.

01:39:44.000 From 1972 to 2016. Incorporated City, eastern Mississippi, zero new housing starts for nearly 50 years.

01:39:54.000 That's crazy.

01:39:55.000 Crazy.

01:39:58.000 Wow.

01:39:59.000 So obviously you're having a positive impact on the community.

01:40:02.000 It's correct.

01:40:03.000 I probably shouldn't do this.

01:40:05.000 I'm going to see if I can find this.

01:40:06.000 While I was waiting for you, a young woman sent me something.

01:40:12.000 She's doing a little economic impact study, and she just sent me this this morning.

01:40:18.000 If I can't find it, we won't worry about it.

01:40:27.000 So, her name is...

01:40:29.000 I shouldn't say that.

01:40:30.000 She goes to Appalachian State University.

01:40:36.000 Here's what I've come up with, given the information shared.

01:40:41.000 White Oak Pastors employees 80% of the total population in Bluffton, Georgia.

01:40:47.000 80% of the people are employed by us.

01:40:50.000 And most of the rest of them probably don't work.

01:40:53.000 Some do, but most of them are older people or welfare recipients.

01:40:57.000 So basically the whole town is employed by you?

01:40:59.000 Oh, 80 percent.

01:41:01.000 And then the rest are just older folks.

01:41:03.000 Or on welfare.

01:41:04.000 You know, I know a schoolteacher or a nurse, but it's not much.

01:41:08.000 Right.

01:41:11.000 In 2020, the census states there were 80 people employed in Bluffton without...

01:41:16.000 It can be employed that...

01:41:19.000 It can be inferred that White Oak Passages helped the employment rate by 128.75%.

01:41:26.000 It's pretty nice.

01:41:27.000 Yeah, pretty good.

01:41:29.000 She also talks about the fact we brought high-speed internet to Bluffton, White Oak Pastures, working with a local provider.

01:41:39.000 We ran...

01:41:43.000 Fiber-optic cable about four miles to Bluffton.

01:41:50.000 Since Bluffton is considered a severe distressed community by the New Market Tax Credit map, it's reported that around 17.2% of adults do not go to the doctor due to concerns about cost, why do a pastor provide health insurance,

01:42:07.000 and da-da-da-da.

01:42:07.000 It's just a long...

01:42:09.000 I'm not going to bore you.

01:42:10.000 So obviously you have a lot of employees and you have a positive impact on the community.

01:42:13.000 You know, the real question, again, it was always about whether or not this is scalable.

01:42:17.000 And what we were talking about is, is it natural to live with 18 million people in one place?

01:42:25.000 I think we both agree it's not.

01:42:27.000 But it exists.

01:42:29.000 So if it exists and you want to feed those people, do we need a certain percentage of just factory farming no matter what?

01:42:36.000 Or is it possible that over time, that if everybody got on the same page, which I'm not saying they would ever do that, but if everybody got on the same page, would it be possible to feed the country the way you grow food?

01:42:50.000 Is it possible for the country to keep growing food the way it's growing it?

01:42:54.000 No.

01:42:55.000 That's another question, though.

01:42:56.000 That's another question, though.

01:42:58.000 It's not possible to do that because we are going to run out of topsoil, right?

01:43:01.000 And what is the estimate?

01:43:03.000 There's like 60 seasons left?

01:43:06.000 Who knows that?

01:43:07.000 But that's the only number I heard.

01:43:08.000 But obviously, if you look at that film, you could see a clear definition of the difference between what's happening with your water, how it's going into that river, and his water.

01:43:18.000 Where his topsoil's fucked and he's just using industrial fertilizer. 0.79

01:43:22.000 It's not good. 0.92

01:43:23.000 Can't do it that way.

01:43:24.000 But can we...

01:43:25.000 So is it a question of we shouldn't be saying...

01:43:28.000 There shouldn't be a Jack in the Box and a McDonald's on every corner because you shouldn't be getting your food like that.

01:43:33.000 Which we all agree.

01:43:35.000 Look, I don't eat that stuff very often.

01:43:37.000 But every now and then, I want one.

01:43:39.000 I like the fact that I could just pull into somewhere and get a burger.

01:43:42.000 It's a very guilty pleasure that a lot of people enjoy, right?

01:43:45.000 But if it didn't happen, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be sad.

01:43:50.000 I'd be okay.

01:43:51.000 If I knew that we were creating more regenerative farms and more people were doing things more naturally, but...

01:43:57.000 In economically deprived places, a lot of people rely on fast food to get their calories, unfortunately.

01:44:05.000 Two things there.

01:44:06.000 One is, all I can do is say again, what I do is highly replicatable.

01:44:12.000 It's not highly scalable.

01:44:14.000 There could be white oak pastures in every agricultural county.

01:44:19.000 In the country.

01:44:20.000 It's just not scalable.

01:44:21.000 But it's not scalable.

01:44:22.000 Right.

01:44:22.000 You have to do it correctly, and the way you're doing it is correctly, where all the animals are working symbiotically.

01:44:28.000 It all is working together.

01:44:29.000 And that's the more attractive thing about it to someone like me who doesn't know anything about farming.

01:44:34.000 I go, well, that guy, the way he's doing it, that's how I want to buy my food.

01:44:37.000 I want to buy my food from a guy like Joel Salton.

01:44:40.000 I had him on the podcast back in the day and we had these similar conversations about this natural blend of these animals existing together and that's what keeps the land healthy.

01:44:51.000 So it's replicatable.

01:44:54.000 There could be a bunch of them.

01:44:55.000 It's not scalable.

01:45:03.000 And I told you that if it is amped up, it'll be because of consumer demand.

01:45:10.000 Now, what I didn't tell you is, and this might sound a little bit self-serving, but it's just what it is.

01:45:17.000 I am a deliriously happy person.

01:45:22.000 I am.

01:45:22.000 You seem like it.

01:45:23.000 I am. 1.00

01:45:23.000 I tell you what, I am a happy son of a bitch. 1.00

01:45:26.000 I believe you. 0.99

01:45:26.000 I'm telling you, I wouldn't change a thing. 0.99

01:45:29.000 But I see a lot of frustrated, unhappy young people in this space.

01:45:36.000 In the farming space.

01:45:37.000 In the regenerative land space.

01:45:41.000 And the difference in me and them is, this is the part that may sound a little self-serving, but I can't help it.

01:45:47.000 The difference in me and them is, they are trying to save the world.

01:45:54.000 And they may not be able to do that.

01:45:56.000 I am trying to save white oak pastures, and I'm probably going to be able to do it.

01:46:03.000 Now, I don't know.

01:46:05.000 I honestly don't know.

01:46:07.000 Me and my management team talk about it a lot.

01:46:11.000 I cannot tell you if I am a niche provider.

01:46:16.000 Or if I am an early innovator changing the way we're going to produce food in this company.

01:46:20.000 I don't know.

01:46:21.000 I hope it's the latter.

01:46:22.000 I do, too.

01:46:23.000 I really do.

01:46:24.000 I hope there's more demand for it.

01:46:26.000 I do, too.

01:46:26.000 And, well, if it happens, it's going to be because there's more demand for it because people want it.

01:46:30.000 But, you know, I don't go to bed at night agonizing over saving the world.

01:46:36.000 I go to bed at night over saving the 180 people that come to my farm every day.

01:46:42.000 And that's all you can do.

01:46:44.000 Well, I... No.

01:46:46.000 No?

01:46:47.000 You can save the world?

01:46:48.000 No, but I can help.

01:46:49.000 You help by doing what you're doing, I think.

01:46:53.000 Last year, we spent money that we really didn't have forming a non-profit.

01:46:59.000 We formed a 501c3 called...

01:47:05.000 Center for Agricultural Resilience.

01:47:08.000 And we did that to help people learn what we've learned over the last 25 years if they want to know it.

01:47:16.000 Now, you know, it's a non-profit.

01:47:18.000 I took some cash and started it, hired a brilliant executive director and fed it until it got going.

01:47:30.000 And that's my part towards saving the world.

01:47:33.000 If you want to do your part in saving the world, you want to replicate what we're doing, you can come there and we'll teach you what we know.

01:47:45.000 But if you don't, I can't help it.

01:47:47.000 I did what I could do.

01:47:48.000 Do you teach people?

01:47:50.000 Yeah.

01:47:50.000 You do?

01:47:51.000 Do you run courses?

01:47:52.000 Yeah.

01:47:52.000 Well, we started this year.

01:47:55.000 Oh, okay.

01:47:56.000 We did the non-profit last year, and I put the seed money in it.

01:48:04.000 And so now she's recruiting... 0.79

01:48:12.000 We do the training.

01:48:16.000 White Oak Passage is the center.

01:48:17.000 That's the lab.

01:48:19.000 It's the demo.

01:48:23.000 I'm very pleased with...

01:48:28.000 The impact I think we're having, whether or not it'll save the world or not, you know, probably not, but it'll help.

01:48:34.000 Now, this brings us back to the original reason why you were on the Fox show that I saw you on.

01:48:39.000 And I was like, I want to hear him talk.

01:48:41.000 I want to hear more of your thoughts.

01:48:42.000 And I think this idea that one person controlling all this farmland, you think it's negative, and I wanted to know why, since you are a farmer.

01:48:50.000 Yeah.

01:48:51.000 All right, so...

01:48:55.000 It's really not just one person controlling that much farmland.

01:48:59.000 It's having a technocrat.

01:49:02.000 As I've explained earlier, I think that the mess we're in has been primarily caused by misapplied technology.

01:49:20.000 Pesticides, chemical fertilizer, sub-therapeutic antibiotics, hormone implants, dot, dot, dot.

01:49:27.000 And I think that Bill Gates, not just Bill Gates, but the people like Bill Gates, find technology as being the solution for every problem.

01:49:41.000 The only tool you got is a hammer.

01:49:43.000 Everything looks like a nail.

01:49:44.000 Mm-hmm.

01:49:45.000 And what he's done in Africa and India and some other places caused me to really – nothing I can do about it – caused me to really disdain technocrats controlling land, people who – And what are these things?

01:50:01.000 What are these things that have been done in these other countries?

01:50:04.000 Yeah.

01:50:05.000 Let them pull that up.

01:50:07.000 I don't want to get into the intricacies of those train wrecks, but they've been train wrecks by bringing technology in as the solution in these biosystems. 0.80

01:50:22.000 You know, Stuart Varney wanted me to say, Bill Gates is an evil man.

01:50:28.000 And I don't have that to say.

01:50:31.000 I'm not judgmental on who's evil, who's not.

01:50:34.000 I think he just wanted to say it quickly.

01:50:36.000 That's why I wanted to bring you here, so you could expand.

01:50:39.000 See, like, you do have this very comfortable way of discussing things.

01:50:44.000 It's very great to hear.

01:50:46.000 But you need time.

01:50:47.000 Yeah.

01:50:48.000 And these are complex issues.

01:50:50.000 So this complex issue of a technocrat using technology as the only tool, this is what you have an issue with.

01:50:57.000 That's what I have an issue with.

01:50:57.000 Yes.

01:50:58.000 Yes, sir.

01:50:58.000 And you think that that's going to be, if this is the largest farm owner in the world, or in the country, rather, and he owns that much land, he's going to use it that way.

01:51:06.000 You take issue with that.

01:51:08.000 I do.

01:51:09.000 And you also take issue with this idea that there's this binary approach to raising animal agriculture, that it is inherently evil.

01:51:18.000 And you're saying, no, it's not.

01:51:19.000 And no, it's not bad for the environment if you do it my way.

01:51:22.000 Absolutely.

01:51:23.000 So if Bill Gates was the number one farmland owner in America and he adopted your practices, that would be a net positive for everybody.

01:51:32.000 It would.

01:51:32.000 And maybe he will.

01:51:33.000 Maybe he'll listen to this.

01:51:35.000 Maybe he'll realize, you know what?

01:51:36.000 We could do a lot more good if we have not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, where you're actually extracting greenhouse gases from the environment and using them in a natural way to grow food for everybody.

01:51:49.000 That could be done.

01:51:51.000 Maybe he's the answer.

01:51:52.000 Maybe someone like him who makes the decision, who owns that much land, he says, you know what?

01:51:58.000 This Will Harris guy's got a really good point.

01:52:00.000 This could be done.

01:52:02.000 It's not impossible to imagine someone like him making that decision.

01:52:06.000 Yeah, you want me to tell you why I think that probably isn't going to happen?

01:52:09.000 Probably.

01:52:10.000 Why I think it probably won't.

01:52:13.000 Right, yeah.

01:52:13.000 All right, so we discussed previously how the narrative that Cattle are destroying the earth, just caught traction, and everybody has heard it, and so many people believe it.

01:52:30.000 It's one of those narratives that people repeat whether or not they have the information at their fingertips or not.

01:52:34.000 Exactly.

01:52:34.000 So let me tell you another one.

01:52:36.000 Okay.

01:52:37.000 Carbon is the problem.

01:52:39.000 Mm-hmm.

01:52:42.000 We have come to talk about carbon like it was evil.

01:52:46.000 You know, carbon is an element on the periodic chart.

01:52:50.000 We are carbon-based.

01:52:51.000 We are carbon-based.

01:52:52.000 That's exactly right.

01:52:54.000 And I talked to you about the cycles of nature.

01:52:57.000 Those cycles of nature are interchangeable.

01:53:00.000 And carbon cycle is one of them.

01:53:02.000 By interchangeably, they react together symbiotically.

01:53:06.000 And you can't have...

01:53:10.000 If all your systems are working well except for carbon, it's not going to work.

01:53:17.000 All of them got to work together.

01:53:19.000 So the fact that the narratives out there that carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, not water, not microbes, not minerals, carbon...

01:53:31.000 My belief is that that is being done at some level intentionally.

01:53:36.000 And there's no doubt in my mind that a technocrat can't come up with a machine Technology that sucks carbon out of the air.

01:53:45.000 Yeah.

01:53:45.000 It puts it in a little ingot that we can store in a warehouse or bury in the soil, bury in the ground.

01:53:52.000 And that is not correcting...

01:53:54.000 That's not going to correct climate change.

01:53:55.000 It's got to be part of the cycles of nature.

01:53:59.000 It's got...

01:53:59.000 The carbon doesn't need to be sucked out.

01:54:02.000 Can you imagine how much somebody could get paid for a machine that'll suck carbon out of the air?

01:54:06.000 I think they've made them.

01:54:08.000 We talked about this before, that they have...

01:54:10.000 I think so, too.

01:54:11.000 But there's going to be an incredible amount of money made on those machines if we make people believe that the only problem is we just got too much carbon up.

01:54:19.000 But would those machines be effective if we use those in urban environments where we don't have regenerative agriculture to do its natural cycle?

01:54:26.000 Would those machines be effective in that if we do have an excess of carbon, they could bring it to a natural balance?

01:54:35.000 That carbon that's in those urban areas, it's the same carbon that's in the rural areas.

01:54:39.000 Right, but without the ability to grow regenerative agriculture in these urban areas, unless we decided to level buildings and start putting farms up everywhere.

01:54:47.000 I don't know that you've got to do that.

01:54:48.000 What would you have to do?

01:54:50.000 Store the carbon in the areas that we're currently farming.

01:54:55.000 So that would do it.

01:54:57.000 It would certainly be a step in the right direction.

01:55:00.000 So if my math is correct and we're storing 100,000 pounds of carbon per acre on my farm, yeah, I think so.

01:55:11.000 So one thing that we have to think about when it comes to pollution in urban cities is that the air is not as good.

01:55:20.000 It's not as good for you, and this is not a knock on cities.

01:55:22.000 Cities are great.

01:55:23.000 You want to live in a city though, you have to acknowledge that you're paying a price for living in those urban environments in terms of your health.

01:55:32.000 Like, that's a reality that's been documented in terms of, like, the length of life that people that live in heavily polluted areas or areas with high particulate matter, they live less.

01:55:43.000 They don't live as healthy.

01:55:44.000 It's not good for you.

01:55:46.000 Where you're living, the way you're establishing, it's actually better for everybody.

01:55:50.000 It's better for you.

01:55:52.000 You're breathing nice, clean air every day.

01:55:55.000 Absolutely.

01:55:56.000 And it's crazy that that's a radical thing, that that's not the norm.

01:56:03.000 Well, I guess my point is that we have this problem with this linear thing we've been doing of pulling carbon out of the sea, the land,

01:56:19.000 fossil fuels, and putting them up.

01:56:21.000 And we've got a natural solution for it, which is the way we manage our land.

01:56:29.000 And I hope we don't succumb to what we've succumbed in the past, which is just grabbing technology to do it in a way that's completely unnatural.

01:56:39.000 You said something earlier where you said you think it's being done intentionally.

01:56:42.000 What do you mean by that?

01:56:45.000 I mean that I believe that this narrative about cattle destroying the earth was done very intentionally.

01:56:54.000 I think that you take the militant vegan community.

01:56:59.000 I didn't finish that part.

01:57:01.000 So I told you I respect the vegetarian vegan decision.

01:57:06.000 They get to decide what they eat.

01:57:07.000 I do not respect the militant vegan decision.

01:57:12.000 Militant vegans want to decide what everybody eats, what I eat and you eat and they eat.

01:57:18.000 So the plant-based protein industry that sprang up so quickly and attracted so much money, I know it's not doing well now, but it sprang up quickly.

01:57:34.000 I think that this overwhelmingly accepted narrative that cattle are bad came from the partnership, loose,

01:57:50.000 probably unintended partnership of the militant vegan community and people that stood to make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.

01:58:01.000 So you got a message.

01:58:03.000 And as you pointed out, the feedlot example makes the message easy.

01:58:09.000 And you've got a very loud voice and a high platform to speak from, which is the people who make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.

01:58:19.000 And the narrative just caught fire.

01:58:22.000 And I think that the carbon may be exactly the same thing.

01:58:26.000 Why aren't we talking about water?

01:58:28.000 Why aren't we just talking about carbon?

01:58:29.000 Right.

01:58:30.000 Why aren't we talking about the damage that these monocrop agriculture farms do to the water?

01:58:35.000 But we're just talking about carbon.

01:58:37.000 Yeah.

01:58:37.000 And if we all go vegan, we're going to need a lot more of those.

01:58:40.000 You're going to need a lot more of those monocrop agriculture farms in order to sustain all those people. 0.65

01:58:44.000 Just like we're talking about sustaining 18 million people with meat, you have a real issue sustaining 18 million people with plant-based protein.

01:58:53.000 And there's money to be made in the business of technology to take carbon out of air.

01:58:59.000 There's a lot of money to be made in that business.

01:59:01.000 When we villainize carbon badly enough that we're ready to have the carbon emitters, Delta Airlines and whoever else, pay a lot of money to mitigate their carbon footprint.

01:59:18.000 Then who's going to, if technology is saw as the answer, there's a lot of money to be made.

01:59:25.000 If it's managing land properly, not so much.

01:59:31.000 When you said that you think that the food industry, like the plant-based protein industry, is not doing as well now, does that give you any hope?

01:59:42.000 That at least people recognizing this is not a choice they want to make, it's not the way they want to eat?

01:59:47.000 When they eat it, it's not satisfying.

01:59:49.000 And then, at least in terms of some of these options, it's not healthy.

01:59:53.000 You know, we talked about it yesterday.

01:59:54.000 We brought up the rat protein or the rat studies that were done with Impossible Burger.

02:00:00.000 They were talking about how they found all sorts of issues with rats that ate high levels of that stuff.

02:00:08.000 It's not a natural way to make food.

02:00:12.000 If you want to eat vegetables, just vegetables, organic vegetables, it's probably pretty healthy.

02:00:17.000 But if you want to eat that stuff, that stuff is not a healthier alternative to ground beef.

02:00:24.000 It gives me hope for others who want to follow us and start this kind of agriculture.

02:00:30.000 That there's a window that people recognize.

02:00:34.000 But the window may be bigger than we thought it was.

02:00:36.000 I never worry too much about plant-based protein because...

02:00:41.000 I mean, I raised my voice against them where I thought it was appropriate and accurate, but I've never...

02:00:48.000 Never worried about it a hell of a lot.

02:00:51.000 When I talked to my management team, I said, you know, that's not what we've got to be afraid of.

02:00:57.000 Because it's just too far reach for my customers.

02:01:02.000 You know, my customers are people that get it.

02:01:05.000 And they don't want hydroponically grown organic vegetables.

02:01:10.000 They don't want vegetable-based meat.

02:01:13.000 They get it.

02:01:15.000 They understand natural systems and evolution.

02:01:18.000 And I just wasn't worried about losing my customer base to it.

02:01:23.000 Of course.

02:01:23.000 I worried about other people having the opportunity to do what I do because of it.

02:01:31.000 But don't you think that the less demand than they anticipated for that stuff is a good sign?

02:01:36.000 I do.

02:01:37.000 I do too.

02:01:38.000 I do.

02:01:39.000 And more demand, or at least it's enticing when people find out the food is raised organically and regeneratively, the way yours is.

02:01:47.000 Attracts people to it.

02:01:49.000 I think now more than ever where people are really conscious about what they put in their body, that's a much more attractive choice.

02:01:56.000 Yes, absolutely.

02:01:57.000 I don't know what the percentages are.

02:01:59.000 I just don't know.

02:02:02.000 To be sure, when I say $25 million worth of stuff a year, there's people out there that will pay 30% more for beef and 100-something percent more for chicken.

02:02:12.000 They're out there.

02:02:14.000 I don't know how many there are.

02:02:16.000 I don't know if there's enough to have a white oak pasture in every county in the United States, ag county in the United States.

02:02:21.000 That's what I hope.

02:02:23.000 Right now, let me tell you this.

02:02:27.000 We can talk about distribution if you want to, but right now, I built my business on wholesale grass-fed beef sales.

02:02:40.000 And now it has evolved to more direct-to-consumer through our website.

02:02:48.000 And I did that for some reasons.

02:02:52.000 And one of them was, I want to be more local.

02:02:56.000 Right now, we ship our product to 48 states, FedEx, UPS, and I don't want to do that.

02:03:01.000 I really want to sell our product.

02:03:03.000 I can't do it in Clay County, Georgia, because it's poor and sparsely populated.

02:03:11.000 I don't want people in California ordering my beef, my pork, my lamb.

02:03:16.000 I want somebody in California to do it.

02:03:19.000 I don't want to send it to New England.

02:03:23.000 Right now, I have to, because I've got to sell $25 million worth of stuff, and I've got to reach as far as I have to reach to get it.

02:03:29.000 But it's my hope that as time goes on, I'll be more and more local.

02:03:35.000 And other people will.

02:03:37.000 So that'll have an even lower carbon footprint, because you don't have to be shipping things.

02:03:41.000 And if there's more places like yours that are in local areas where people can get their food locally, that's better for everybody.

02:03:47.000 Yeah.

02:03:47.000 So, I'll tell you this.

02:03:49.000 The Whole Foods Market continues to be my biggest customer.

02:03:54.000 They used to be virtually my only customer.

02:03:59.000 But my relationship with Whole Foods has been cooling for a decade, and eventually I won't be in there anymore.

02:04:09.000 I, Will, Will, Harris, me, sold Whole Foods Market the first pound of American grass-fed beef that they marketed as American grass-fed beef.

02:04:23.000 20 years ago.

02:04:25.000 And at the time, it was so lucky, and it just caught traction, and they wanted to buy all I sold.

02:04:37.000 But today, it's a very different Whole Foods, and we won't be there long.

02:04:43.000 What's the issue?

02:04:47.000 You know what greenwashing is?

02:04:49.000 Greenwashing? 0.86

02:04:49.000 Yeah. 0.86

02:04:50.000 No.

02:04:51.000 Sort of.

02:04:52.000 Greenwashing is big food advertising using words to make consumers believe that the food they're selling is the same as what I'm producing,

02:05:09.000 even though it's not.

02:05:11.000 Hey, is that...

02:05:11.000 Have you got that...

02:05:13.000 A Global Animal Partnership Whole Foods video where you can show what to show.

02:05:18.000 Please.

02:05:22.000 So, greenwashing.

02:05:25.000 Greenwashing.

02:05:26.000 Okay.

02:05:28.000 So what's this meat rating system about?

02:05:31.000 Let me put it this way.

02:05:32.000 Step one is like...

02:05:33.000 Step five is like...

02:05:36.000 So, step five.

02:05:38.000 Let's get a New York strip and definitely a filet. 0.63

02:05:42.000 And do you have...

02:05:43.000 What the hell does that mean?

02:05:44.000 I can't tell you how much that angers me.

02:05:46.000 Tell me what that means. 0.94

02:05:48.000 That makes me so goddamn mad. 0.95

02:05:49.000 Is that their question? 0.95

02:05:50.000 I mean, that is their video that they made?

02:05:52.000 Yeah.

02:05:53.000 That was their article.

02:05:55.000 Let me see.

02:05:57.000 Come on.

02:05:58.000 It makes you laugh.

02:05:59.000 It makes me mad.

02:05:59.000 I'm sure it does, sir.

02:06:00.000 But as me, as a consumer, looking at that, like, what?

02:06:03.000 Come on, man.

02:06:05.000 You're supposed to be Whole Foods.

02:06:06.000 Whole Foods, to me, is supposed to be a place where I can go and get healthy food.

02:06:10.000 It's like the idea behind it, Whole Foods started by hippies, started here in Austin.

02:06:14.000 Great, Whole Foods.

02:06:16.000 I want Whole Foods.

02:06:16.000 Let me go there.

02:06:17.000 But what is...

02:06:18.000 And this is...

02:06:19.000 What does that mean?

02:06:21.000 You have so many things you can tell me in a short period of time.

02:06:24.000 Healthier, better for the environment, low-carbon footprint.

02:06:28.000 It's all those things they can tell me.

02:06:30.000 Instead, they go...

02:06:32.000 And that's their commercial.

02:06:33.000 So this is about greenwashing.

02:06:36.000 And Whole Foods and Global Animal Partnership are big on greenwashing.

02:06:43.000 Okay.

02:06:43.000 What is step five and step four?

02:06:45.000 What does that mean?

02:06:47.000 So let's talk about the Global Animal Partnership.

02:06:50.000 Okay.

02:06:51.000 The Global Animal Partnership is an animal welfare system.

02:06:55.000 Nonprofit that Whole Foods financed, I don't know, 15 years ago or something.

02:07:01.000 I don't know how long ago.

02:07:03.000 And I went to the first meeting, producer meeting, they ever had in Denver of the Whole Foods had for the Global Animal Partnership, rolling it out.

02:07:13.000 And it was all about this And by the way, I thought it was a great idea at the time.

02:07:21.000 This animal welfare system, so that step one, which is low-hanging fruit, a little bit better than industrial.

02:07:32.000 Two, three, four, five.

02:07:33.000 And five was great animal welfare.

02:07:37.000 No physical alterations, can't castrate, whatnot.

02:07:43.000 We used to castrate everything born on my farm that wasn't named Harris.

02:07:49.000 And we quit castrating all the things we had to do to achieve step five.

02:07:57.000 And it was explained to us at the time that, you know, we want to bring the industry into higher animal welfare, which was right up my alley.

02:08:06.000 I did too.

02:08:07.000 And we've got to have this step one, two, which is low-hanging fruit that pretty much anybody, it's like, hit your foot in the door.

02:08:15.000 But all companies are expected to move up the continuum.

02:08:22.000 I thought it was great.

02:08:23.000 Sounds great.

02:08:25.000 So I embraced it and it became a step five plus.

02:08:31.000 I don't think they have just a very few in the country.

02:08:34.000 We want them.

02:08:35.000 And they never would pay us any more if our product.

02:08:39.000 But as a result, In the case, in the meat case, everything was step one, step two, maybe a little step three.

02:08:47.000 And they did allow producers, mostly big multinational corporations, to come in at step one and two and languish there.

02:08:54.000 You know, 15 years later, they're still step one, step two, which is not the way it was supposed to work.

02:09:02.000 So...

02:09:05.000 Now, instead of, even though there's five steps, they talk about how it's all great.

02:09:12.000 And it's not all great.

02:09:13.000 If you're going to do it with your hands and mouth like that guy, you know, so step one's like, step five's like, you know, not...

02:09:25.000 It just pisses me off.

02:09:27.000 I would imagine.

02:09:28.000 But you go to Whole Foods and look and ask them, how much step four and five you got back there?

02:09:37.000 And probably not much.

02:09:40.000 So most of it...

02:09:42.000 Here it goes.

02:09:42.000 Jamie's got it here.

02:09:43.000 Step one, no cages, no crates, no crowding.

02:09:46.000 Step two, enriched environment, things to do.

02:09:49.000 Step three, enhanced outdoor access.

02:09:53.000 Step four, pasture-centered, based on an outdoor system.

02:09:57.000 Step five, animal-centered, no physical alterations.

02:10:01.000 That means castration and all that.

02:10:03.000 And then Step 5 +, which is you, animal-centered, entire life on the same farm.

02:10:08.000 As shoppers can know exactly what the animal was raised for, the meat they are buying just by looking for the color-coded step.

02:10:19.000 Rating on the product label as of October 1st, 2014, the Step 5 program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range from Step 1 to Step 5 plus and raise more than 147 million animals annually.

02:10:36.000 But they added everything together there.

02:10:37.000 Step 5 and program, look how they did that.

02:10:40.000 Step 5 and program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range From step one to step five plus.

02:10:48.000 So by saying that and includes these 2,451 farms, they're not saying how many of them are actually step five. 0.69

02:10:55.000 They're like kind of fucking with you with the numbers there.

02:10:57.000 And I can tell you it's not many. 0.98

02:11:00.000 It's not 2,451.

02:11:02.000 But that's step one to step five.

02:11:04.000 I'm not saying there weren't that many farms.

02:11:07.000 I'm saying there's not...

02:11:08.000 Not that many step fives.

02:11:09.000 The distribution would be greatly skewed.

02:11:12.000 So if you go to a Whole Foods and say, hey, so I want that, how many you got?

02:11:20.000 It's less, far less.

02:11:21.000 So they have to get very specific meat from places like you.

02:11:24.000 Well, I mean, I think the reason they had that particular segment now is because they didn't have much Step 5 back there.

02:11:32.000 So that allowed them to say, hey, man, it's all good.

02:11:36.000 Right.

02:11:36.000 It's all good.

02:11:37.000 It's all better than anywhere else you're going to get.

02:11:39.000 And that's greenwashing. 0.97

02:11:40.000 That's greenwashing. 0.97

02:11:41.000 That makes sense.

02:11:42.000 It devalues what the Step 5 Plus does.

02:11:46.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:11:47.000 It's a kind of a moronic way of describing it. 0.84

02:11:51.000 It's a different Whole Foods than the one I started with. 0.89

02:11:54.000 Is it because it's corporate now and it's because it's owned by big companies and it's all about when you're involved in a gigantic corporation like that, it's about maximizing profits.

02:12:05.000 Yeah.

02:12:06.000 Everything you said is right.

02:12:08.000 The way I would state it is that industrialized farming and big food distribution co-evolved together.

02:12:19.000 You know, prior to the end of World War II, there was no industrial farming.

02:12:24.000 And there were really no great big food companies or retail companies, you know, local Piggly Wiggly or whatnot, but they weren't.

02:12:33.000 And those all co-evolved, big ag, big food, and industrial farming co-evolved together to what it is now.

02:12:43.000 And, you know, the guys that are managing the meat departments for Whole Foods really need to pick up the phone and say, Send me 48,000 pounds, a truckload of 48,000 pounds of six-ounce fillets to the following five distribution centers every week for the next month.

02:13:07.000 Thank you.

02:13:08.000 Well, the Will Harris's of the world won't ever see 48,000 pounds of six-ounce fillets.

02:13:16.000 The only people that can do that are Tyson, Cargill, JBS, Smithfield.

02:13:24.000 So that's that co-evolution.

02:13:30.000 So the only way...

02:13:33.000 This is going to work.

02:13:34.000 To do it your way is if someone's deeply committed to change.

02:13:39.000 Yeah, let me say this.

02:13:40.000 I also sell to a grocery chain called Market District, one called Mom's, one called Publix, one called Kroger, and I don't feel as used as window dressing.

02:13:58.000 By those stores.

02:13:59.000 So you feel that, like, your way of doing it is almost like it's a trick.

02:14:05.000 They're trying to pretend that most of their meat is gotten from people like you.

02:14:10.000 That's my perception of what you just saw.

02:14:12.000 Well, it seems like that was the perception that I got from it, too, based on the way they used that giant number and said it's anywhere from Step 1 to Step 5+.

02:14:20.000 They kind of lumped everybody in together.

02:14:22.000 I actually sold Publix Supermarket Prior to selling Whole Foods.

02:14:29.000 I sold them before I did Whole Foods.

02:14:31.000 And they, Publix, it's not advertising, they have ordered consistently from me every single week for 20 years.

02:14:40.000 They put it out there.

02:14:43.000 People buy it or not. 0.85

02:14:47.000 There's no bullshit. 0.82

02:14:48.000 There's no smoke and mirrors. 0.97

02:14:53.000 No greenwashing.

02:14:54.000 No greenwashing.

02:14:55.000 It's just honestly, buy it or not.

02:14:59.000 And, you know, again, Whole Foods is still my biggest customer.

02:15:02.000 This is probably going to get me thrown out if it does.

02:15:04.000 Do you think so?

02:15:04.000 Do you think they will?

02:15:06.000 I don't know.

02:15:07.000 You just don't seem to care, though. 0.99

02:15:10.000 Well, I ain't much in the ass-kissing business. 0.99

02:15:12.000 I like it. 0.98

02:15:16.000 They do what they want to do.

02:15:19.000 We'll have to work a little hard and settle a little more online. 0.99

02:15:24.000 But you'd prefer that to bullshit. 0.94

02:15:31.000 You know, there was a time that it's just a very different company. 0.98

02:15:40.000 I get it.

02:15:41.000 I get it.

02:15:42.000 And again, your company and what you're trying to do is very attractive to people, particularly people like me. 0.98

02:15:48.000 And one thing I should bring up before we end this is that you brought me some testicles. 0.99

02:15:52.000 No, scrotum. 0.99

02:15:54.000 Actually, I brought some testicles too. 0.99

02:15:55.000 Oh, okay. 0.99

02:15:56.000 Thank you. 0.96

02:15:58.000 So this is a scrotum that's been turned into a bag? 0.96

02:16:02.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:16:03.000 This is where you could keep the ring, if you were like Bilbo Baggins?

02:16:06.000 The cowboys call that a poke.

02:16:10.000 So this is a sack?

02:16:11.000 That is a test. 0.99

02:16:12.000 That is a scrotum. 0.98

02:16:13.000 What does one generally keep in here? 0.99

02:16:15.000 Change? 0.99

02:16:17.000 Well, the bull keeps his testicles in there. 0.99

02:16:19.000 Right, the bull does. 0.85

02:16:20.000 But a human, once you turn it into one of these things that you just gave me, what should I use that for?

02:16:25.000 Scrotum to totem, I guess.

02:16:28.000 And you can cinch it up nice and tight.

02:16:31.000 Keep your charms in there.

02:16:32.000 Maybe some crystals.

02:16:33.000 Golf balls.

02:16:34.000 Golf balls!

02:16:35.000 There you go.

02:16:36.000 Jamie's a golfer.

02:16:37.000 Hi, Jamie.

02:16:37.000 So you can keep...

02:16:38.000 How many golf balls can fit in this sucker? 0.98

02:16:40.000 At least two. 0.99

02:16:41.000 At least two.

02:16:42.000 Probably more, right?

02:16:43.000 Maybe three.

02:16:44.000 There was two in there before.

02:16:45.000 How many do you need in a round, though?

02:16:46.000 You'd probably lose a few.

02:16:47.000 Hopefully just one.

02:16:48.000 Really?

02:16:49.000 Do you ever go through a whole round of golf with just one ball?

02:16:51.000 Done it one time.

02:16:55.000 So you can keep a couple golf balls and change.

02:16:58.000 I think this would be very attractive to people that like crystals.

02:17:01.000 You know, we end up able to operate at zero waste.

02:17:08.000 We slaughter...

02:17:10.000 That's great. 0.99

02:17:11.000 We slaughter...

02:17:14.000 Yeah, 20, excuse me, about 100 cows a week, 40 hogs, 40 sheep or goats, several thousand birds, and at our slaughter plant, which is on the farm.

02:17:26.000 And that generates about nine tons of what's called packing plant waste. 0.81

02:17:34.000 We call it a nutrient stream.

02:17:35.000 It'd be feathers, the bones that are not good, soup bones, eviscerate gut feel, heads, whatnot.

02:17:43.000 And we compost that and spread it back out on the land.

02:17:49.000 So I'm very proud of that nutrient stream, that zero waste, the hides.

02:17:54.000 We make rawhide pet treats out of them or leather products.

02:18:02.000 One thing, my daughter told me that you ate some of our liver on your show.

02:18:08.000 Yes, I did.

02:18:09.000 Yeah.

02:18:09.000 Paul Saldino gave me some of your liver.

02:18:11.000 So you might find this interesting.

02:18:13.000 When I first built my packing plant in 2007, Sadly, we literally threw away, composted, essentially threw away, a lot of the liver, the heart,

02:18:29.000 the bone, a lot of the bones, the fat.

02:18:33.000 We made biodiesel out of the lard and tallow.

02:18:36.000 Fast forward today, because of the work that these nutritionists, carnivore, I think you had Diana Rogers on, Paul Saladino, those kind of people...

02:18:49.000 We sell everything now.

02:18:52.000 All of the pork fat goes into lard.

02:18:56.000 We've got a product called Praise the Lord.

02:18:59.000 The beef fat goes into Tyler.

02:19:02.000 We've got a product called Tyler Be Thy Name.

02:19:08.000 We make broth out of the bones.

02:19:13.000 Organs that we used to throw away like tracheas and penises and esophaguses go into, we dehydrate them for pet treats. 0.99

02:19:22.000 And it's just, it's been a real blessing how, and thank God it did because we need the income stream.

02:19:34.000 We're able to market everything these days.

02:19:36.000 And zero waste.

02:19:37.000 It's a plus on both sides.

02:19:39.000 That's beautiful.

02:19:40.000 I mean, that's what everybody would love to see from a farm that they did business with.

02:19:45.000 Can I tell you about another one?

02:19:46.000 Yes.

02:19:47.000 So, the most exciting thing we've got right now is very new.

02:19:51.000 Well, it's two years old to us.

02:19:54.000 I'm sure you know there's been this explosion of renewable energy, windmills and solar.

02:20:01.000 And we are in a hot spot.

02:20:05.000 For utility-sized solar voltaic production.

02:20:10.000 Big, big thousand acre.

02:20:12.000 There's a company called Silicon Ranch, which is a shale company, that is putting in like three or four thousand acres of solar voltaic in our area.

02:20:28.000 And when I heard that they were doing that, I was a little dismayed by it, because I've seen those, you know, beside the road, and it's just, to me it was horrible.

02:20:38.000 The land usage part is so unnatural.

02:20:44.000 I used a little political capital and got the CEO to come down, a really sharp guy, Reagan Farr, the CEO. And Reagan is a lawyer, MBA,

02:21:00.000 corporate And I thought it was a Hail Mary.

02:21:03.000 I wanted to convince him to let me use the land to graze for the vegetation control.

02:21:09.000 And I didn't think he would let me do it.

02:21:12.000 And when he came down, I was explaining to him and he started listening to me. 0.99

02:21:18.000 I said, shit, this is great. 0.99

02:21:21.000 I really thought I was just throwing it out there. 0.99

02:21:25.000 And as it works out, he is that ultimate corporate But his daddy was the poultry production manager at LSU, and he was raised showing chickens, and he just got it.

02:21:39.000 And you might find, I hope you find this interesting.

02:21:42.000 I do.

02:21:44.000 But when we first started, he said, I just don't see why it's better for the land.

02:21:50.000 And I said, you know, natural systems, ruminant.

02:21:54.000 He said, well, yeah, I mean, I just don't see it.

02:21:56.000 So we were at a place on my farm where we had done some mowing of excess vegetation.

02:22:03.000 We don't do that too much.

02:22:05.000 Right beside where I was grazing.

02:22:08.000 And I stopped, got him out, and I said, all right.

02:22:13.000 This is where we mowed excess vegetation, like you do under your solar panels.

02:22:18.000 And this is where I grazed it.

02:22:21.000 Now you see this grass material laying on top, probably 70% of it will oxidize and go up into the air and never find, the microbes will never know it was there.

02:22:36.000 It's all about feeding microbes, microbial cycle, right?

02:22:40.000 On the other hand, If that grass had been bit by a ruminant, a sheep, a goat, a cow, and spent 48 hours in that fermentation tank that they call a rumen, and then is defecated out on the ground,

02:22:56.000 it is like liquid, not solid liquid gas, like liquid-like currency.

02:23:05.000 It's immediately available to those insects and microbes.

02:23:10.000 And can you not see how that is life-giving, life-forming, and this is not?

02:23:15.000 He said, oh yeah.

02:23:19.000 And we're going to be grazing about 3,800 acres for them by the end of 2024 or 2025. Well, that's fantastic.

02:23:30.000 If you can get him to listen, maybe there's hope.

02:23:32.000 Maybe you can get other people to listen.

02:23:33.000 I think that solar grazing is going to be a thing.

02:23:37.000 Because of the solar panels, you need to have the vegetation removed.

02:23:42.000 And that water coming off, right?

02:23:44.000 Yeah.

02:23:44.000 Which one you want?

02:23:45.000 You want your water.

02:23:46.000 Yeah.

02:23:47.000 So the same thing will happen there.

02:23:49.000 Right.

02:23:49.000 And the other thing about it is, you know, there's so many underserved farms.

02:23:53.000 I'm not an underserved farmer.

02:23:55.000 I inherited a very nice farm.

02:23:57.000 There's so many underserved people that would like to farm and like to farm properly that don't have access to land.

02:24:05.000 And with the millions of acres that are going in, I just think that's great.

02:24:13.000 That is great.

02:24:15.000 Well, listen, Will, this has been a very enlightening talk. 0.84

02:24:17.000 I really appreciate you keeping up with my stupid questions and filling us in on all this information and giving us an understanding of what the real problem is and what your solution is and the way you're doing it.

02:24:32.000 And it's just nice to know that there is options like that available. 0.97

02:24:36.000 And there are people like you that are committed to doing it that way, that is so attractive to people like me.

02:24:42.000 Well, thank you.

02:24:43.000 I really appreciate being able to be here with you and reach so many people, and I hope that it does help move the P a little bit towards moving from industrial commodity agriculture to something that's kinder and chiller.

02:25:00.000 I think it does.

02:25:01.000 And I think, you know, there's always going to be these problems of scalability and these things that we're talking about in terms of fast food and just feeding large numbers of people.

02:25:08.000 But personally, people can make their own choices that are regenerative and beneficial and are ultimately a much more natural solution.

02:25:19.000 Well, again, if it happens, it's going to be because of individuals making a choice, not government, not farmers, not big food, not big ag.

02:25:29.000 But I think, unfortunately, most individuals aren't informed of the whole process the way you just described it.

02:25:35.000 So I really appreciate you coming in here and laying it all out for us.

02:25:38.000 It's everything I hoped it would be.

02:25:40.000 Thank you.

02:25:40.000 So thanks for being here.

02:25:41.000 I appreciate it.

02:25:42.000 And tell people, White Oak Pastures, where's the website?

02:25:45.000 What is it?

02:25:47.000 The website is whiteoakpastures.com.

02:25:51.000 Social media is all the same, White Oak Pastures. 0.99

02:25:53.000 Yeah, I don't know about all that handles this shit. 1.00

02:25:55.000 You don't pay attention to that shit? 1.00

02:25:56.000 I'll tell you this. 1.00

02:25:57.000 You might find this interesting.

02:25:59.000 We actually sold the book rights to White Oak Pastures about a year ago to Penguin, Viking, Random House, and they hired a lady to write the book, and it'll be out.

02:26:15.000 They Galley copy or gallery copy or something is out, and it'll be published this time next year, and it's called A Bold Return to Giving a Damn.

02:26:27.000 All right.

02:26:28.000 Well, we'll let everybody know when that book comes out.

02:26:30.000 Thank you.

02:26:31.000 Thank you very much.

02:26:31.000 Really appreciate your time.

02:26:32.000 Thank you.

02:26:33.000 All right.

02:26:33.000 Thank you, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 03, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris

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Summary

Transcript